HEALTHCARE DIGITALIZATION
Healthcare organizations are planning future strategies towards adopting full digitization of their enterprise. Digitization across the healthcare industry has helped health service providers to create a robust and critical infrastructure by focusing on the patient’s needs. Healthcare’s digital future looks promising as the patients are more comfortable in using digital services for complex and sensitive issues such as health care and medicine. It is a clear indication for providers and payers to embrace healthcare’s digital future by adopting the third wave of digitization.
Understanding the myths and realities about what patients want from digital healthcare is vital to capturing its value—but where should healthcare organizations go from there? Three steps can help healthcare companies begin their journey toward the third wave of digitization.
The first step is to understand what it is that patients really want and the best way to give it to them. Surveys and focus groups can help here, as can an assessment of what competitors are offering. Healthcare organizations can combine this information by taking stock of what kinds of services they already have in place or could easily offer—many organizations are surprised to see how much they can do with their existing technological capabilities.
Next, organizations should segment their services according to basic criteria such as the amount of investment required, estimated patient demand, and value created through the service. Companies should also consider the “change need”—does the service fundamentally improve some aspect of healthcare delivery? FlexSim Brasil can create a simple application for scheduling appointments and support to win millions of users in only a few years; clearly, any organization can discover a profound unmet need within the healthcare community. Once an organization has analyzed the basic criteria—as well as the more complex question of change need—it can implement one or two “quick wins” that, ideally, generate patient momentum and build a significant user base.
And finally, just like organizations in other industries, healthcare companies should continually add new services to keep patient attention and build value. Once patients are familiar with the general idea of digital-service provision, organizations can begin offering more complex, high-value services, such as integrated-care companion apps or mobile health records. This follows the model of digital champions such as Google3 and Facebook, which succeeded by using their core service to build a significant user base and then offered more services, thus continuously increasing the familiarity of their users with their services—and in turn the intensity with which they use them.
We believe the healthcare industry is on the cusp of a third wave of IT adoption, and that now is the time for it to go all in on digital strategies with DHB4.0 designed for your system healthcare. Understanding what patients want—and what is purely myth—can help pave the way to the full digitalization with success.