Dell EMC will be exhibiting at HIMSS19 in Orlando in February, and will be discussing, among many other things, what the company identifies as two most important health IT trends: the rise of multi-cloud frameworks and the need for an IoT strategy to support analytics at the edge.

The explosion of digital healthcare data from electronic health records, connected devices, high-performance computing for clinical genomics and pathology, the healthcare internet of things and precision medicine is forcing healthcare organizations to rethink their data strategies and next-generation infrastructure to future-proof their IT environments, said Dave DeAngelis, general manager of global alliances for healthcare at Dell EMC.

"To further optimize the use of data to collaborate in a digital care ecosystem, healthcare organizations must advance their adoption of multi-cloud operating models for standardizing and automating common provisioning, deployment, monitoring, data protection and security services," he said. "While healthcare organizations already are deploying private and public clouds as part of their digital transformation strategies, Dell EMC will be demonstrating specific solutions aligned with our healthcare partner ecosystem to take IT to the next level as a broker of IT services."

A multi-cloud operating framework provides the blueprint with the appropriate architectural approach and governance/standards to bring together private, hybrid, public and specialty cloud services into a single comprehensive, multi-cloud operating approach, while reducing risk and complexity, he explained.

On another front, healthcare provider organizations also can reduce risk in their healthcare IoT strategy to speed up ROI – from patient to provider to cloud, DeAngelis stated.

"To take advantage of the IoT opportunity, organizations need to connect the physical world with the digital, starting with real-time monitoring for visibility, then adding analytics and eventually automation," he said. "Each step builds confidence in the next. The IoT continuum spans the edge, distributed core and cloud, with zones of intelligence that perform analytics while it matters, where it matters and how it matters – optimizing value for the health system."

In addition to specific use-cases for IoT for video monitoring and patient sitters, the vendor at HIMSS19 will highlight an open, scalable platform that includes the ability to simplify data collection, manage devices on the network, centralize data storage, provide on-demand analytics and integrate networking, he said.

Wearable technology and virtual patient observations enabled by the IoT are allowing health systems to improve patient engagement before, during and after hospital visits – and transforming the patient experience, DeAngelis said.

"Reducing inpatient stays using in-home monitoring – for example, heart monitors, glucose monitors and spirometers – improves the patient experience and makes a direct impact on the bottom line by avoiding readmission penalties, notifying clinicians of abnormalities or the need for intervention," he explained. "Many healthcare organizations have started their IoT journey with one application driven by a single business case/need – but the true potential of IoT is the ability to connect systems, and provide even more valuable outcomes from the open, scalable 'system of systems' and the network effect.”

When building the IoT architecture, Dell EMC suggests a strategy to create not just an innovation loop, but rather a virtuous cycle where an organization has data coming in from connected devices, going through the edge, core and cloud, and insights being discovered and pushed back out to the edge.

"In healthcare, this might mean collaborating to find new treatment protocols, or tracking drug effectiveness more quickly than possible in the past," DeAngelis said. "It might mean connecting disparate research efforts working on the same problem or finding new ways to more efficiently deliver hyper-specialized care."

Regardless of a healthcare organization's initial strategy, the investments in the underlying technology and infrastructure need to support the next generation of computational, storage and communication capabilities required to meet the growing demands of collecting, analyzing and securing healthcare IoT data, he added.

"Moving to a multi-cloud operational framework will be integral to digital health transformation," DeAngelis said. "Success starts not with just the technology, but with the health mission and cross-functional collaboration across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including business, technical, operational and financial."

Healthcare organizations, he added, also will want to consider data flow from acquisition to action. Multi-cloud services can help IT organizations meet demands for easier access and more sophisticated uses of data while ensuring privacy and security, he contended.

"A multi-cloud operating framework also provides IT organizations with a MAT – modernize, automate, transform – structure for rationalizing and modernizing legacy and acquired applications," he explained. "The ability to provision cloud-native platform-as-a-service accelerates the development of new software that can be deployed in multiple types of clouds to simplify workload management and make digital transformation a reality."

Dell EMC will be in booth 3159 at HIMSS19 in Orlando, February 11-15, 2019.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com 

Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.