Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Authored By: Hon Chew Seetoh, Director of Asia, Boomi.

Customer experience has always been more complicated when it comes to health services. Not least because, often, healthcare providers face the challenge of demand outstripping available resources. Even for highly lauded health systems like Singapore’s, which ranked 12th in the latest World Index of Healthcare Innovation, there remain gaps that need plugging to improve service delivery further.

Underscoring the magnitude of the problem, a recent joint statement by SingHealth, the National Healthcare Group, and National University Health System stressed that resource optimisation was crucial for the nation’s health system, amid a surge in patient numbers.

Naturally, patients are eager for a departure from the days when a hospital appointment meant idling in a waiting room, before finally being met and hurriedly assessed by a physician. While no silver bullet, technology can offer healthcare providers with the ability to circumvent the tedium that characterises this experience.

Somewhat ironically, it was the pandemic that truly highlighted the potential technology offers for providers in the face of strained healthcare resources. It showed that leveraging remote assessments allowed significant numbers of patients to be diagnosed without long wait times or a sense of being rushed through their check-ups.

While remote appointments were possible, there was some initial trepidation. Understandably, pandemic-fuelled uncertainty made it difficult to say if such investments in technology would bring long-term benefits.

However, it is now apparent that they are more than just a fad.

The Rapid Rise of Digital Health

According to Bain and Company, the number of telemedicine users in Asia Pacific rose sharply in the first months of 2020 during the onset of the pandemic. Meanwhile, McKinsey found this growth has been rapid and will continue, estimating the value of digital health in Asia to jump from USD $37 billion in 2020 to USD $100 billion by 2025.

The pandemic has indeed inflicted a terrible global toll. But as it winds down into the endemic phase—becoming more manageable to live with—healthcare needs to harness the collective lessons learned. Technology has shown to be essential to transforming the patient experience for the better in a post-pandemic world. Locally, concerns such as a limited labour force due to Singapore’s ageing population have led the government to launch a new Virtual Centre for Healthcare Innovation Living Lab. The initiative will incorporate Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in the training of medical students and health professionals.

“Patients are eager for a departure from the days when a hospital appointment meant idling in a waiting room, before finally being met and hurriedly assessed by a physician. While no silver bullet, technology can offer healthcare providers with the ability to circumvent the tedium that characterises this experience.”

This is an encouraging development and a great way to kickstart the search for better ways to care for patients. The fact is that there are essentially five key strategic areas that are ripe for positive change in the provision of better healthcare services. The common thread is that they all require a new way of thinking about digital connectivity and automation moving forward:

1. Frictionless Experience Across the Board. People want healthcare to meet them where they are and provide a one-stop service for seeing a physician, getting tests performed and receiving prescriptions. It is not just patient expectations that have grown, either. Physicians, doctors, staff, locums, caregivers—everyone—expect this service. Everyone’s time is valuable and costly. Eliminating time-consuming tasks enables them to focus more on patient care.
2. The Right Multi-Cloud Strategy Raises the Bottom Line. The pandemic exposed gaping cracks in infrastructure as C-suite leaders said “remote this” and “virtual that.” That gave IT teams, burdened with brittle, outdated systems, the authority to evaluate new technologies. Cloud migration reduced costs by removing the burden of managing legacy infrastructure while improving organisational agility. That trend will accelerate because connecting the growing number of cloud-based applications enables data blending to extract insights that save money and create better patient experiences.
3. Transforming Order-Takers into Value Makers. The crisis demonstrated a new approach to problem-solving and how IT can help the broader business survive and even thrive in a crisis. Instead of mere “order-takers” carrying out instructions, technical teams are more involved in the up-front decision making. They are “value-makers.” Traditionally, IT has been considered a cost centre. Now, we see it can be a profit centre as technologists serve as trusted partners to ensure faster implementation of strategic decisions and that new care pathways are delivered efficiently.
4. Harnessing Corporate Insights for Market Advantage. The world is witnessing an explosion in data from new sources such as top-of-the-line applications, connected devices like home-monitoring sensors, wearables and more. Internal and external information (such as patient-supplied data) needs to be easily accessible so it is useful. That only happens by connecting all of those sources. However, Forrester estimates that over 60% of data within any organisation goes unused for analytics. That is a lot of wasted opportunity for improving care and gaining a market advantage.
5. Creating a Value-Based Healthcare Model. According to the US International Trade Administration, Singapore already leads ASEAN in terms of healthcare spend annually on a per capita basis. With a sizeable population of senior citizens and a changing demographic landscape, this can be expected to rise further. It is clear that the coin-operated model for transactional-based medicine is unsustainable. As such, healthcare is moving away from fee-for-service to a more holistic, value-based care model that rewards providers for reducing the incidence of chronic diseases. This shift requires a nimble delivery of care that IT can help provide by connecting all systems to provide a complete view of a patient’s overall health rather than treating issues on a one-off basis.

Every healthcare organisation is pushing processes to the cloud to take advantage of the speed, agility, interoperability and information sharing that they previously lacked in closed, on-premises technology architectures. Over the last two years, they have seen the potential for better care and cost savings become a reality.

“People want healthcare to meet them where they are and provide a one-stop service for seeing a physician, getting tests performed and receiving prescriptions.”

The pandemic reshaped healthcare in unexpected ways and forced an overdue jumpstart of healthcare digitisation. Yet, as society moves beyond this crisis, it would be an incredible shame if the broader industry didn’t put into practice what has been learned.

After all, nobody wants to wait in a doctor’s office if they can avoid it.

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