No aspect of the world has gone untouched by the massive digital transformation over the past few years. While many fields have been digitally transformed, digital transformation in healthcare finance has perhaps been the most impacted area. Indeed, information technology has dramatically impacted virtually every healthcare organization. It has cleared a path for new access and portability of healthcare records, made booking appointments and getting results much easier, and helped upgrade what a healthcare organization can do for their patients.
These days, digital transformation is no longer optional; it's necessary. Here is a look at how digital transformation in healthcare has impacted the field.
None of the changes in the healthcare realm occur in a vacuum. Indeed, much of the need for digital transformation in healthcare finance happened as a direct result of regulatory requirements.
For example, consider the impact of HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. HIPAA implemented a wide array of privacy regulations over the healthcare industry and information technology within a healthcare organization. However, this did not stop digital transformation in healthcare—in fact, quite the opposite. HIPAA regulations helped give consumers confidence that their information could only be available and exchanged on secured networks. The enforcement of such regulations has allowed patients to feel more confident when they turn to digital tools to manage their healthcare.
The same can be stated for the way that regulations impact safety standards. While not perfect, healthcare regulations helped create minimum standards that digital tools had to adhere to. These standards have allowed users to use digital tools in safe and secure ways and allowed doctors to turn to digitally transformed tools. For example, smartwatches immediately relay vital medical information, and doctors could increasingly rely on augmented reality or virtual reality tools that are safe and approved by the FDA.
Finally, the increase in information technology and healthcare organizations' regulations has given them more confidence in their ability to get involved in this field. There is an understandable hesitation within businesses interested in digitally transformed healthcare tools. After all, new regulations can come out that may require extensive and expensive reworkings of their products. But regulations also allow for stability and predictability within the market, thus ensuring that these companies won't be wasting their investments.
No industry has avoided digital transformation, and digital innovation has altered customers' expectations. Customers now expect easy access to a wide array of digital tools, allowing them to access their healthcare information and providers on-demand to give them greater control over their own healthcare. Customers also expect greater access to healthcare tools.
This digital transformation in healthcare has touched many areas, including:
Big Data refers to massive amounts of data that incorporate multiple data streams from numerous sources. From a digital transformation in healthcare perspective, big data means examining the sum of all of the data from a patient on either an individual or population level. Big data is critical, and it can provide many different advantages to healthcare organizations. For example, it can:
Your healthcare organization simply needs adequate healthcare technology that can continue the "consumerization" of the healthcare industry. This means that you need Enterprise Resource Planning software to manage an array of functions and be successfully integrated with all of your operations. As such, your healthcare organization needs the following:
Any ERP that is worth its value must be capable of meeting a variety of important systems and goals.
First, such an ERP must provide automation options. Consumers expect specific options to exist at this point. You can create a system that ensures consumers can automatically access their own records, set up appointments, cancel appointments, and ask questions that they can reliably have answered. This system should be set up so that there is minimal effort on your end.
Second, such a system must be scalable. You must be able to upgrade its capacities and continue to integrate any of its functionalities into your overall efforts. You should be able to do this at a cost and work level that is reasonable for your healthcare organization, and at no point should future upgrades be out of reach for your organization based on cost.
Finally, your ERP should be future-proofed. This means that it must be capable of adding new functions or modules that patients may need. It is difficult to predict the future, and who knows what healthcare innovations will be available over the next few years that patients will come to expect and demand at home. Being able to predict these innovations is not necessary. What is required is that an ERP that you work with be capable of adjusting to these innovations without wholesale change. In this way, digital transformation in healthcare can be future-proofed.
Multiview Financials ERP can help in your digital transformation in healthcare. We deliver a true partnership experience; powerful, data-centric financial enterprise resource planning software combined with a compassionate team who will guide you on your climb towards operational excellence. Click here to request a demo.