The Changing Facets Of Healthcare In New World Order By Biswajit Mohapatra, Partner and Executive Director, IBM India

The Changing Facets Of Healthcare In New World Order

Biswajit Mohapatra, Partner and Executive Director, IBM India | Wednesday, 27 January 2021, 09:50 IST

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Biswajit Mohapatra, Partner and Executive Director, IBM India

Healthcare industry is as old as the humanity itself. We have come a long way from the prehistoric days of using leaves to cure ailments to contributions by Sushruta and Charaka to invention of modern medicines. The technological advancement coupled with globalization and democratization of knowledge has radically transformed the industry in recent times.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought in unprecedented disruptions. Healthcare became everyone’s priority with temporary hospitals erected on a war scale, health professionals worked round the clock and resources poured-in to find the vaccine. The crisis accelerated industry trends such as remote patient care, digital medicine, virtual patients and genome synthesis further. The all-pervasive shift towards Digital will revolutionize healthcare industry in coming days.

The New World Order           

Healthcare industry is witnessing accelerated pace of innovation. New business paradigm is forcing healthcare enterprises to reshape business process, reimagine business model and reinvent new ways of work based on orchestrated ecosystem, responsive operation and actionable insights. Hybrid Multicloud is the foundation for this transformation journey towards Digitally Transformed Cognitive Enterprise.

The Changing Facets of Healthcare

Healthcare industry is transitioning to the new world order, fueledby Agile, Design Thinking, NextGen Technologies, Ecosystem Expansion and Cognitive Automation.

The trends that are shaping up the future healthcare industry are

• Making healthcare personal

Healthcare data will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% through 2025. Personalized diagnosis and recommendations are going to be driven by data analytics leveraging power of AI / ML technologies built on Hybrid Multicloud foundation. Pattern recognition and forecasting techniques will predict known to unknown facilitating accurate diagnosis and treatment.

• Remote patient care

In a digital contactless virtual world, emergence of collaborative platforms and AR / VR technologies will drive remote patient care ensuring real time interventions without any surprises and educating patients about the ailment through gesture-sensitive user interfaces. 5G technologies will give a tremendous boost to telemedicine.

• Virtual Patients

Replacing patients with simulations will make clinical trials faster and safer. AI / ML based knowledge acquisition tools will reduce the drug discovery and clinical trial timeframe. The mathematical models drawn from non-invasive methods will provide biological insights and computer-based diagnostics.

• Omni Channel Patient Engagement:

Conversational AI engages patients on common issues, reducing burden on public healthcare infrastructure. Seamless experience to patients will be delivered through the channel of their choice enabled by scheduling, workflow, automated assistance and digital voice. Innovative and intuitive self-service healthcare systems will address channel integration, event orchestration and omni-channel personalized engagement.

• Digital Medicine

Think about a situation where your watch detects changes in your voice, expression, sleep, social engagement patterns and sends you an alert to seek help for depression. It even goes one step ahead to suggest chatbot-based counselling. This is power of Digital Medicine. There will be resurgence of apps that can diagnose and treat what ails us. Digital pheno typing will save healthcare costs by suggesting people to make behavioral changes before disease sets in.

• Health outcomes powered by Blockchain

Blockchain will enable visibility and transparency throughout the drug supply chaintracking drugs to their point of origin. This will avoid counterfeit drugs and improve health outcomes and patient safety. Secure Blockchain-based patient health information sharing with healthcare payers will ensure timely access to healthcare records and reduce Medicare fraud.

• Empowered Patients

When patients are engaged, empowered, equipped and enabled, they are more likely to have improved health outcomes. Wearables, tracking devices and implants will provide patients greater control over information, decisions and actions affecting their health. Psychographic segmentation will help communicate with patients amplify their engagement.

• Targeted therapies with Genome Editing

Research propelled through advanced imaging, nanotechnology and gene-editing enabled by advanced computing gives a ray of hope in the fight against diseases such as cancer, Sickle cell and muscular dystrophy. Genotyping will trigger evidence-based predictive, personalized and participatory medication.

Hybrid Multicloud Transforming Healthcare

Secured hybrid multicloud infrastructure is going to be the foundation for new-age healthcare enterprises. The chaotic application portfolio of enterprises needs to be assessed based on strategy, business, technology and cost value to create the cloud transformation roadmap. Migration, modernization and rationalization of workloads to best-fit cloud taking an outside-in approach will drive the success. There may be a need to simplify complexity systematically and build cloud-native applications leveraging micro-services and containerization. Workloads to be replaced by commercial off-the-shelf packages in a SaaS model is also a trend healthcare enterprise are embarking into. Following table depicts cloud adoption strategy for healthcare business processes.

Cloud adoption will aid in driving revenue growth through personalized patient experience, optimized operations, greater reach during time of disaster, better storage, reduced costs, superior data interoperability, enhanced anywhere care delivery and improved patient care.

Data protection and privacy is an important imperative for Healthcare. With increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks and data theft, securing digital healthcare data is the industry priority. There will be increase in implementation of zero-trust security and threat modelling techniques in coming days. Healthcare enterprises are embracing HIPAA-compliant cloud as an agile and low-cost option to ensure privacy and confidentiality.

Conclusion

Amidst the disruptions brought in by Covid-19, healthcare industry is learning to adapt NextGen technologies, intelligent workflows and platform economy. Healthcare enterprises are moving from traditional strategy planning to scenario envisioning through probable, plausible and possible outcomes. The new world order will be built on agility, flexibility and innovation powered by resilient secure Hybrid Multicloud platform.

Healthcare industry is at an inflection point presenting a great opportunity to leverage exponential technology and realize the dream of holistic and inclusive healthcare for all.

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