Consumers, accustomed to personalized and streamlined digital experiences, now anticipate the same for their healthcare interactions: a standard of engagement that depends on an integrated ecosystem of researchers, providers, and payers. Historically, the healthcare ecosystem is quite the opposite, operating from silos with limited information sharing and mainly disconnected processes. The structure undermines the sector’s ability to elevate healthcare services in line with changing patient expectations.
Enabling proactive care has emerged as an imperative for keeping costs down and empowering patients to take charge of their own health. Across the healthcare ecosystem, organizations are committed to exploring ways to deliver preemptive treatments for chronic diseases while simultaneously rolling out wellness programs that encourage positive and healthy behaviors.
Central to that mission is the rise of connected medical devices, including everyday wearables that track sleep patterns and exercise activity along with specialized tools such as glucose and heart monitors. These connected devices are creating a data deluge that can be transformed into insights used to improve patient care. Through technologies such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), healthcare providers are transforming the collected data troves into high-level intelligence that can trigger more personalized and precision-based care, from enhanced diagnosis to individual patient treatment guides, as well as enabling microsegmentation for ultrapersonalized insurance benefits.
The years-long global pandemic has upended the healthcare sector in countless ways. One of the more compelling outcomes has been the need to innovate richer and faster patient experiences that transcend hospitals, doctors’ offices, and other clinical environments to enable the continuum of care when it’s not possible to meet in person. Healthcare organizations are now committed to enabling affordable, accessible care delivery, including telehealth visits and enhanced patient/doctor interactions, in homes and at other remote locations.
On the business end of healthcare delivery, there has been a decades-long movement away from fee-for-service healthcare models to a new paradigm based on inclusive value-based care. This ongoing shift requires technology integration to emphasize more effective, more affordable quality patient care and to tie payments to better health outcomes and lower costs.