Digital transformation.

There’s probably been no bigger buzzword across industry in the last two years. The race for enterprise digitization is on, and now even early digital resisters are rapidly trying to catch up. If it took a while for people to figure out just what “digital transformation” means, it’s taken even longer for healthcare organizations to get their arms around the right strategy for pulling it off.

Transformation is not the challenge. Nearly everyone acknowledges the need and has jumped on the ship to get there. But the absence of an outcomes-defined, end-to-end strategy has led many to assume that digital transformation is simply a matter of EHR adoption and maturity—that it simply refers to the digitization of clinical records systems. Or that it means shopping for the right digital solutions to replace the ones they currently have, only to be stymied when adoption of those solutions exposes a broad range of underlying infrastructure and integration problems.

The real challenge is digital convergence—the perfect storm of integration pressures that now exist on everything from network and security to patient engagement and data analytics. No part of the healthcare enterprise has been left out of the digital picture, and figuring out how to connect and integrate that ecosystem of emerging digital capabilities is what’s truly keeping CIOs up at night. How do I architect the right infrastructure to support all of that cutting-edge new tech my hospital is adopting? How do I automate the right pieces of my operation? Where does IoT fit in? What do I do with all of that data? How can I stay ahead of my patient’s expectations for customized digital experiences? How do I secure all of those new access points to my PHI?

This will be top of mind for attendees at the upcoming HIMSS Show in Las Vegas (March 5-9). Today’s healthcare enterprise is focused on improving quality of care through meaningful patient engagement, meeting regulatory requirements for secure health information, delivering personalized customer experiences and enabling workforces through mobile digital solutions. Emerging technologies designed to meet those needs are converging in ways that are transforming healthcare delivery.

Healthcare organizations are certainly looking for digital solutions, but they’re also in need of innovation strategies that enable them to deliver these top-priority business outcomes:

1. Secure health information. Safeguard protected health information and critical organizational data, both in transit and at rest, to support regulatory compliance.
2. Drive patient engagement. Deploy mobile solutions that engage patients in their care programs to support and improve health outcomes.
3. Deliver personalized experiences. Adopt new business models and digital technologies to offer meaningful, personalized experiences for all users (patients/guests/clinicians/customers).
4.  Streamline operations. Transform infrastructure, virtualize communications and enable a mobile workforce to control cost and improve care access.
5. Transform data into information. Leverage the right analytics to unlock the potential and promise of health data and deliver that information at the point of care.

We’ll unpack those priorities across this blog series over the next few days, so stay tuned for the next installment.  In the meantime, if you want to know more about digital convergence and how it’s reshaping customer experience, check out our recent webinar on Transforming the Digital Customer Experience.

Verizon will be showcasing solutions that address each of the top five priority outcomes outlined above at HIMSS 2018. Come see us in Booth #3243 or visit our conference website here.

About the Author:

Tim Stevens, global lead for vertical marketing, Verizon Enterprise Solutions