Four major technology trends, which are becoming more
intertwined every day, will dominate the healthcare IT landscape in 2013,
according to IDC Health Insight’s top researcher, Scott Lundstrom.
These trends—social media, cloud, big data and analytics,
and mobility—already are having a big impact on many healthcare provider and
payer organizations, but CIOs will be faced with managing and deploying many of
these technologies as their use becomes pervasive during the coming year.
Lundstrom calls these tech trends the “four pillars” of healthcare IT and
recently presented them during a keynote presentation at UBM Technology’s
Healthcare IT Summit.
“By using technology we can go out and make a difference in the
quality and cost of care,” Lundstrom told the CIOs gathered at the
conference. “The answer to doing more with
less in healthcare is getting closer to the patient with cloud, analytics,
mobile, and social/unified communications.”
Cloud
When it comes to cloud computing, private cloud is emerging
as the platform of choice to transform healthcare IT departments and make
technology more efficient and accessible. New business requirements are
demanding new architectures, and cloud platforms are a priority for payer and
provider CIOs.
Healthcare IT executives are using the cloud in many
different ways and for varying reasons, but according to IDC Health Insights’
research, both payer and provider healthcare organizations stated that data backup
and archiving is the No.1 storage solution in the cloud, with server capacity
on demand a close second.
Security issues, however, may be holding back broader
deployment—at least in the short term. Security and availability concerns were
stated as the biggest impediments to deploying cloud storage solutions by 22
percent of the payers and by 40 percent of providers surveyed by IDC. “Most
breaches are not the result of an inept third party; they are from a laptop
left in the car or a USB left on the desk by employees,” said Lundstrom.
Also, healthcare organizations must adhere to HIPAA security
safeguards such as security management processes, workstation and device
security and access control for proper implementation, which pose further
challenges.
With all of the advantages of cloud storage, payer and
provider IT executives are slowly looking beyond its challenges and beginning
to implement cloud strategies for 2013. According to IDC Health Insights,
nearly one-third of both payer and provider organizations are currently
researching and evaluating the purchase of cloud technology. Meanwhile, 31 percent of payer organizations
said they are currently deploying cloud technologies while only 16.5 percent of
provider organizations said they were using the cloud.
“At the end of the day, the cloud is just another place to
put things,” said Lundstrom.
Big Data And
Analytics
The explosion of data is creating challenges in healthcare
around the volume, variety, velocity and value of information associated with
it.
HIEs are certainly a focus area for big data and analytics
in 2013 because of the vast amounts of data involved with the sharing process.
“We’ve done a great job of getting
analytics and research, but we’ve done a really bad job of getting it in the
hands of the physicians,” Lundstrom said. The safe exchange of patients’
information will continue to get a lot of payer and provider IT executive
attention in the coming months.
At the same time, IT executives’ focus regarding big data
and analytics will slightly shift to include care management, population
health, care team collaboration, transitions in management, analytics and
business intelligence. This move in the focus of data aggregation to big data
and analytics is the future of healthcare IT.
Mobile
Mobility’s pervasiveness is creating new demands on healthcare data
centers—given the need for instant connectivity, streaming video and the
transfer and sharing of large medical images.
Doctors want to the ability to take a CAT scan image from the
hospital’s system to their iPad or iPhone simply and seamlessly so that they
can travel throughout the hospital with the image. Doctors, nurses and other
health payer and provider employees are demanding mobile applications and
access to the network, and CIOs must have the back end ready to host such
devices.
However, accessing patient data on mobile devices is still a challenge
because of security issues and the cost of supporting such devices. “It
always seems to be the discussion of the gadget. The gadget is not where the
money or difficulty is—supporting the device is also easy from a technical
standpoint. The real issue is the money that’s in the back end [network,
storage, data centers, virtualization],” said Lundstrom. “We have to grow our
mobile platforms to satisfy the gadget demands of the users, and we have to
secure information. “
Social Media And
Unified Communications
Every customer or patient has a voice, and healthcare payer
and provider organizations can use social media to hear those voices and use them
to bring tremendous value to patient care. The next generation of consumer
engagement will leverage consumers’ social profiles, according to IDC Health
Insights, as should be tapped into as a resource to effect positive health
behaviors.
IDC Health Insights asked payer and provider IT executives
about their top challenges in using or deploying social media tools and found
that executive support, justifying expenses of social software, maintaining and
keeping track of all the posted content and getting customers to participate
were cited most often.
Forty-two percent of payers and 24 percent of providers said
their top challenge is getting executive support—the fact that these numbers
are slightly low compared to the other challenges proves that healthcare
organizations understand the need for social media and technology method
innovation.
However, regardless of the challenges, social media is a
technology that will thrive in the healthcare industry in 2013, according to
IDC Health Insights. “Facebook is an 800-million- user social media application
platform, and consumer engagement solutions in healthcare will be increasingly
mobile and connected to social networking sites like Facebook in the coming
year,” said Lundstrom.
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