Using the latest digital tools, healthcare providers can offer more equitable and efficient solutions to their patients.
Modern healthcare faces mounting challenges, from patients struggling to access care in remote areas to providers grappling with rising costs and operational inefficiencies. Digital transformation is changing the game, offering innovative solutions like telehealth, patient portals, and cloud infrastructure to improve access, enhance care delivery, and streamline provider operations.
“Digital transformation in healthcare isn’t just about technology,” says Laura Kidd, NRI Director of Healthcare Practice. “It’s about working with our healthcare clients to imagine tomorrow’s digital health possibilities and innovate for them today. At NRI, we empower providers to provide the best experience for patients, support the well-being of caregivers, and enhance efficiency.”
Healthcare Access Challenges Without Digital Transformation
Traditional healthcare faces serious challenges, many of them related to patient access.
For example, people living in remote, rural areas may have trouble accessing the services they need, often forcing them to travel great distances. The National Rural Health Association points out that the patient-to-primary care physician ratio in non-urban areas is 39.8 doctors. 100,000 people. This compares to 53.3 physicians per 100,000 in cities. The numbers are even more stark for medical specialists (such as oncologists or orthopedic surgeons), where there are about 30 per 100,000 in rural areas and 263 per 100,000 in cities.
Patients may have designated health providers but might not be able to visit them conveniently because they lack the means of transportation, or a clinic’s hours may fall outside their availability. In addition to these barriers, long wait times for consultation and treatments and the proper medical care can be hard to come by.
From the healthcare provider’s point of view, traditional models have limited scalability for transforming how they cater to patients, including rising demands and adopting the latest innovations.
Technologies Driving Digital Transformation in Healthcare
To deal with these challenges and others, a digital workplace evolution in healthcare is taking place and changing how care is delivered. . These changes include:
Telehealth Platforms
Telehealth or telemedicine platforms expand care delivery and are reshaping the industry through virtual consultations, remote patient monitoring, and AI (artificial intelligence solutions).
To provide extensive care services, virtual consultations may use high-definition video, secure data transmission, and AI-powered pre-screening. These services can help reduce waiting times, ensure continuity of care, and give patients access to the healthcare professionals they need no matter where they live.
With remote patient monitoring (RPM), healthcare organizations can monitor patients’ glucose levels, heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital signs from afar and only call them in if they require aid. This can improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.
AI can streamline operations, make better diagnoses, enable tailored treatments, and do much more.
Patient Portals
Patient portals can help increase engagement with people, boost the efficiency of healthcare organizations, and reduce their administrative burden. Patient portals also:
- Provide patient easy access to their health information
- Make it easy to schedule appointments
- Enable simple prescription refills
- Provide secure communications so patients can ask questions
- Facilitate better coordination among different healthcare providers.
Mobile Health Apps
Mobile health apps serve various purposes, including general health and wellness, telemedicine for virtual care, and health management.
Health management apps allow users to monitor specific conditions like heart disease, diabetes, pregnancy, and mental health. They also assist with medication tracking, while healthcare providers can remotely share health reports and medical records, enhancing patient engagement and care coordination.
Cloud Infrastructure
In order to provide innovative, reliable, and secure healthcare services, organizations require the proper cloud infrastructure. The cloud can dramatically transform how providers deliver affordable, quality patient care.
A cloud-based hybrid IT infrastructure, for example, can serve to:
- Support digital transformation
- Improve data security
- Contribute to data-driven decision-making
- Improve digital record-keeping
- Make it easy to scale
- Help to adopt a more patient-centric approach
- Enhance collaboration
- Allow data-sharing among applications, devices, and systems
Benefits of Digital Transformation for Patients and Providers
Digital transformation can help provide patients—especially those in rural and underserved communities—better access to healthcare services while reducing the administrative burden and operational costs for healthcare providers. Organizations can also enhance patient engagement and satisfaction by providing improved, more affordable services.
The Harvard Business Review points out that technology can also play a role in scheduling staffing for hospitals and clinics, improving and reducing the costs of supply chain management, and decision-support systems “can provide valuable insights to aid in making . . . triage, admission, and discharge decisions.”
NRI’s Role in Digital Healthcare Transformation
NRI is a leader in customized “healthcare solutions” for telehealth, patient portals, and IT modernization. So far, we have helped more than 130,000 physicians do their jobs better through technology, and more than 80 hospitals modernize with the latest digital technologies.
For example, we worked with Frederick Health, the largest healthcare provider in Frederick County, Maryland, to make the patient experience faster, better, and more secure. This played into their vision of providing world-class healthcare while maintaining a personalized community feel.
Our scalable solution helped Frederick Health implement a streamlined call center and more secure infrastructure and enabled improved patient communications through free Webex licenses provided for 250 doctors.
Does your organization want to start its digital transformation journey? The first and most important step you can take is to contact NRI. By improving the technological health of your organization, you will be able to provide better healthcare to your clients.
