Information Age Healthcare - The need of hour for India

In India as well as countries around the globe, the cost of taking care of people continues to rise every year. At the same time that the world’s population is aging, chronic diseases like asthma, diabetes, heart disease and obesity are increasing at rapid pace in every age group. In addition to this shrinking workforce and shortage of doctors and nurses (India: is currently running short of at least 600,000 doctors and 1 million nurses), along with the fact that fewer young medical professionals are training to replace them.

Combine all this with legacy hospital infrastructure and technology, paper-intensive record-keeping, and inconsistent standards, and there is no doubt that the situation calls for a smarter, more effective approach to healthcare.  This is also critical because a robust healthcare system is the hallmark of organized development. Healthy citizens will translate into a productive workforce and a thriving economy.

By definition this is a holistic approach to healthcare that integrates the best of technologies to remove information barriers, enabling data to be analyzed and shared in real time. Smart healthcare is about forging time and creating cost-saving collaborative partnerships among doctors, administrators, insurers, and healthcare institutions. It is about integrating communications into a single, consolidated infrastructure, and giving communities and individuals the tools and knowledge they need in order to make more informed choices. Such digital healthcare delivery systems powered by the Network can significantly improve operational efficiency, optimize collaboration, and lead to better patient care and outcomes.

A comprehensive solution that integrates real-time voice and video, clinical collaboration, patient and asset tracking, electronic medical records and nurse call information allows hospitals and healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients and less time on administrative tasks. Smart healthcare solutions can help improve both care delivery and business operations for hospitals and medical professionals by:

• Providing essential information to doctors and staff, regardless of the devices used
• Giving real-time access to patient records, images and expert consultations 
• Accurate tracking and location of patients, staff, equipment and medical supplies 
• Education programs for medical staff and patients

These solutions take full advantage of the limitless possibilities of Telehealth. IP video technology can link patients and providers to specialists and primary care professionals, paving the way to faster and more cost-effective remote medical consultations, patient diagnosis, and chronic disease management.

In countries like India, critical investments are needed in healthcare (remote health, elderly care), health information exchange, and telehealth. Evidence strongly suggests that implementing Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) can result in higher quality and safer, more patient-responsive healthcare. Mobile collaboration technologies and BYOD for example can be useful in delivery of better health outcomes.

In summary therefore, adoption of technology enabled solutions complimented with an array of healthcare management services, will help the healthcare industry in India leapfrog into 'Information Age Healthcare', much quicker than imagined before.

Healthcare Information Technology Trends in 2014

Year 2013 has been an eventful year in the healthcare industry. HHS (Health and human services) issued set of modifications to the HIPAA privacy and security rules assuring enhanced protection for patients’ protected health information. Quick adoption of EHRs (electronic health records) in the wake of the HITECH Act and the phenomenal growth in remote monitoring capabilities—specifically mhealth, made the news. Serious talks were delivered on the importance of liquid data within healthcare organizations accelerating their journey to an effective and efficient personalized care. And we also heard about Google Glass being the potentially transformative new gadget that could revolutionize healthcare soon.

The healthcare IT landscape is evolving and the market is on an upswing for sure. To keep pace with the rising tide, it may be worthwhile to have a quick look at some of the healthcare IT trends predicted by the experts and industry analysts for the year 2014.

1- Mobile healthcare- The Rising Star

Mobile healthcare also termed as m-Health by many, is rapidly gaining interest amongst the consumers and the developer fraternity. The m-Health market, consisting of medical devices like cardiac monitors, diabetes management devices, Wearable fitness tracking devices and healthcare applications is estimated to be valued at $6.6 billion in 2013 and is expected to reach $20.7 billion by 2018 at a healthy CAGR of 25.5%, according to research report.

With growing number of healthcare apps in app stores and increased awareness of the benefits of preventive and wellness oriented programs, m-Health has the potential to transform the healthcare industry.
ISV’s in the healthcare domain may find better acceptance rates for integrated m-Health applications, which can seamlessly interact with other devices, apps and are able to share data to provide comprehensive healthcare.

2- BYOD- Clinical Staff Embracing Tablets & Smartphones in their Workflow

Healthcare industry has been no different than any other in the mixed interest shown towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The administrators are skeptical of it citing security concerns, whereas doctors and nurses have been championing towards the cause due to increased flexibility and mobility provided in their workflow with usage of tablets and smartphones.

Benefits of BYOD in healthcare include but not limited to better access to patient information resulting in enhanced medical care to improved communication and cost savings.

Healthcare organizations considering the growing wave of mobile users will need to outline a good BYOD policy which also caters to and are in compliance with HIPAA and HITECH requirements.

3- Data Security – Privacy and Integrity of Data to be a Prime Concern

Healthcare industry deals with extremely sensitive data and with the recent changes to HIPPA under the HITECH act has made data security a top concern/priority for Healthcare CIO’s. Security administrators will need to work harder to strike a balance between adequately protecting the confidentiality and integrity of patient information and at the same time ensure ready access to the data to authorized personnel.

4- Interoperable IT environment – Healthcare Information Exchange Standards to get a push

Healthcare information exchange (HIE) is the capability to mobilize healthcare information electronically among incongruent healthcare information systems within a region, community or hospital system, while upholding the meaning of information being exchanged.

The healthcare industry is striving towards developing an environment of interoperability amongst healthcare information systems, where the healthcare data can move freely, be accessed and analyzed by various systems in secured way to provide timely and efficient patient centered care, irrespective of vendor producing the electronic health record (EHR) data.

To achieve this, the industry is pushing for standardization in recording of patient data and for IT solutions to have interoperable frameworks to facilitate secured retrieval and access of data.

5- Big data Solutions – Adoptions to increase

With the advent of digitized patient data in form of EHR’s and host of data collected from wearable medical devices, healthcare industry can definitely benefit from Big Data technology.

We have recently highlighted how Big data analytics can help in healthcare industry. The decision making in healthcare can be improved substantially by using Big Data Technologies. Using Hadoop eco system, health care providers can now process massive data sets to see the evidences and arrive at correct decision faster than before.

Leading research firm Gartner states that Healthcare industry is second in terms of investments planned during the next two years (2014-15) for Big Data.

6- Clinical Decision Support Systems- Increase in Implementations

A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a knowledge based application which analyzes data to help healthcare providers make better decisions. It is an adaptation of the decision support system (DSS) commonly used to support business management.

As stated in the above trend, patient data in digitized form is now available and hence constitutes as the essential data supply for these decision support systems. Also the Centre for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) in its meaningful use stage 3 wants hospitals to increase use of CDSS.
The demand to utilize these data mass to help healthcare personnel arrive at better decisions is growing.

7- Healthcare Data in Cloud- Migration to Increase

Organizations across the healthcare industry are looking towards Cloud computing offers in this turbulent transition phase towards IT. Cloud offers flexible storage facilities for ever-increasing clinical data and solves the challenge involving access and sharing of this data across various systems and geographies without significant costs and infrastructure investment.

Research firm IDC states that the cloud presents strong opportunities for healthcare providers to create efficiencies, flexibility, and agility while increasing service levels for applications.

We could surely see healthcare institutions migrate more and more data into the cloud in a bid to comply with regulatory requirements and also to drive down their operational costs and improve healthcare delivery.

The above mentioned trends depict a very exciting transformational direction for healthcare industry. It will be interesting to see how Big Data transforms the healthcare industry with its key insights and actionable information and how m-Health improves patient well being.

References:

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2593815
http://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/how-attain-meaningful-use
http://www.emrapproved.com/what-is-emr.php
http://searchhealthit.techtarget.com/definition/clinical-decision-support-system-CDSS