Healthcare organizations are rising to meet new patient care and financial realities, including work-from-home capabilities and significantly expanded virtual care options.
As healthcare leaders are reopening facilities for non-urgent clinical services, they are also juggling workforce considerations ranging from employee health, to childcare, to mass transit concerns alongside changing patient expectations. At the same time, healthcare IT teams are evaluating smart options to accelerate digital transformation, supporting new clinical workflows and infrastructure needed to evolve virtual care, remote patient monitoring, and secure patient-provider communications.
Virtual care presents the opportunity for healthcare organizations to expand their reach with a larger set of patients and the ability to offer enhanced services for new business revenue streams, such as virtual specialty consults in new geographies; scaling remote engagements with home-based diagnostics and treatment for patients with chronic diseases; and expanding telehealth to post-acute care.
In speaking to healthcare leaders as they move forward, we are hearing consistent themes across their organizations as they consider upcoming IT investments:
Power On-Demand Operations and Data Protection
Every healthcare provider is focused on how to best improve efficiencies as they work to overcome severe budget pressures that came from cancelled elective surgeries, as well as unexpected labor and protective equipment costs over the last few months. From the IT side, this means continuing with the optimization of EMRs, evaluating network efficiency, and implementing intelligent/automated data storage across edge, core, and cloud environments to help reduce costs.
Health systems are also expanding virtual care, which brings new requirements for data interoperability along with data protection. With healthcare leaders further empowering patients to take a more active role in the management of their care, consumers and clinicians alike will need secure access to growing health data. To provide “secure care,” healthcare organizations need to incorporate solutions that protect people, network, endpoints, data, and recovery.
Reimagine Patient Engagement – Extend Secure, Connected Care
Two-thirds of Americans are more willing to try telehealth today than ever before. They value the flexibility to communicate with care providers at a time that is convenient for them from the comfort of their own home, while reserving in-office visits for patient care episodes that require it.
As providers evolve telehealth services, they must continue to improve interoperability across the care continuum to gain a complete picture of the patient from all sources – EMR, AI, IoT devices, direct patient input, and more – whether the patient is chronically ill or seeking wellness guidance. To enable data aggregation and seamless data access across the healthcare system, providers need the flexibility to turn traditional on-premises infrastructure into a private cloud and to operate across multi-cloud environments. A consistent infrastructure reduces infrastructure costs by 18 percent and security breaches or outages by 30 percent, according to research conducted on behalf of Dell Technologies, VMware, and Intel.
Enable In-the-Moment Innovation
A modern multi-cloud digital infrastructure will help empower clinical teams with agile platforms, secure access, and expanded data interoperability. It will also lay the foundation to deploy emerging technologies for precision diagnostics, clinical genomics, and more – which are needed to transform medical diagnostics and automate patient data analysis so clinicians can dedicate more time to decision-making and treatment.
To take full advantage of cloud offerings, IT departments must first assess their workloads and applications to determine the best cloud model for each. They must also develop a greater understanding of where data is coming from and going to, in order to achieve flexibility and deliver a seamless experience to providers and patients.
Dell Technologies offers a single, integrated strategy that allows healthcare organizations to conduct application portfolio analysis, map dependencies to develop appropriate patterns for application service level agreements and promote automation by adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Healthcare Leaders’ Next Action Plan
Healthcare leaders must make smart investments to build agility and accelerate the digital transformation needed to support new workflows, models for connected patient care, and radically enhanced business and clinical flexibility.
The progress is certainly not going to be linear. We see pressure on the healthcare system ebb and surge throughout the country. We also see rapid innovation and new opportunities that will transform care, creating a stronger, more innovative, and more resilient healthcare system for the long term.
Dell Technologies is working with customers to foster healthcare organizations’ business and clinical agility, including EMR modernization, advanced medical imaging, virtual health, and security. Learn more here.
