The Beat of Healthcare Digital Transformation - II

In December I wrote about how “digital” is driving continuous transformation in healthcare, bringing advances at speed unimaginable just a few years ago. To illustrate my point, let me quickly tell you about Michael Ellis DeBakey (September 7, 1908 – July 11, 2008), a Lebanese-American cardiac surgeon, scientist, and medical educator. At age 23, while still in medical school at Tulane University, DeBakey developed the roller pump, which provided a continuous flow of blood during operations. In and of itself it was a compelling invention, but its true significance would not be realized for another 20 years when it became an essential component of the heart–lung machine. The continuous flow of blood the pump provided during operations made open-heart surgery possible.

 (photo courtesy of @John Wiley and Sons)

You’ve probably guessed by now my interest in this topic isn’t just academic; I, and many others who have had invasive cardiac operations, have benefited from Dr. DeBakey’s contributions. Just think how different the patient experience is in cardiology since that first human heart transplant in Cape Town in 1967!  

And so this brings me to Digital Transformation in the healthcare industry because what we’ve seen in the past is nothing compared to what we’re seeing now, and will be seeing. We’re moving from decades to years to months in tackling huge health issues, both societal and for the individual.

At the societal level, just look at Ebola. We now have a 100% effective vaccine against that disease and, the amazing thing is, we just sort of take for granted that what would have taken decades not long ago, is accomplished so fast today. The work researchers and scientists at the Biocomplexity Institute at Virginia Tech are doing provide some fascinating insight into the new approaches in fighting disease.

And at the individual level breakthroughs in micro medical technologies, drug therapies, electronic devices embedded in the body, and noninvasive procedures are accelerating and will continue to do so. In both cases, we will be generating significantly more data that researchers, medical professionals and health care consumers will have access to. The key is bringing context to data and turning that into actionable insight, for every type of user.

What we are seeing is the confluence of medical innovations (protocols for patient care in cardiology, nephrology, orthopeadics or any other area) and technology innovations (blockchains, artificial intelligence, big data analytics etc.) that open up new and efficient ways of patient care, care co-ordination and interoperability across systems and organizations responsible for care.  

All good….so how do we pull it all together? How do we marry all of the rich new data, information and applications with current systems? How do we wow the user? As Sudhir Kulkarni, President, Digital at Persistent Systems says

“At the heart of this transformation…is the experiences - patient, physician, nurse practitioner, intensive care giver, home based care giver etc. All such experiences need to be built at SPEED and by leveraging the core healthcare systems and processes inside of provider or payer organizations through a platform that opens up APIs to build such experiences…”

Many leading organizations use Dell Boomi (Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader) to facilitate this rapid integration in a secure manner. Boomi provides many “out of the box” pre-built connectors, client sourced field mapping indices, and the choice of a local or cloud-based run time engine. DJO Global for instance, uses the Boomi solution to help increase operational efficiency by providing interoperability between their MotionMD software solution and patient EMRs. This helps balance the cost of care with positive patient outcomes, and improve patient satisfaction as well as the healthcare provider’s bottom line — all by streamlining data entry and improving data quality and compliance.

In 2017 I look forward to the many breakthroughs we will see this year in the Healthcare and technology fields. What do you think will be the most interesting advances we’ll be talking about in January next year?

Here’s to a happy, and healthy, 2017 for all of us!