Building a More Secure Connected Healthcare Environment

The healthcare sector is in the crossover of a major transformation, including changing demographics, patient acuity, and rapidly advancing technology. A core element of this transformation is the advent of connected healthcare, which can empower physicians to deliver superior results, improved customer experience and increase patient life spans.

Nowadays healthcare ecosystem allows seamless data integration between devices, EHR, wearable’s, etc. Healthcare professionals are leveraging these new technologies and devices to re-invent the way they interact with patients, provide care and improve patients’ quality of life. Connected healthcare can yields significant improvements in patient outcomes, including substantial reductions in hospitalization, mortality rates, and medical costs.

Healthcare IT leaders in today’s digital era face a two-way edge sword; great opportunity and a scary challenge: deriving value from massive volumes of data while meeting sharp demands for data privacy with increasing data breached every year. Healthcare IT leaders must reevaluate their approach to key initiatives across population health, patient engagement, and care coordination.

Connecting Data for Better Outcomes

With technological advancements, providers have shifted from paper-based to digital records. The focus on maximizing value and care outcomes requires healthcare organizations across the healthcare ecosystem to work together, enabling to store patient information digitally and allow stakeholders to view reports, communicate among selves and do more right from the comfort of their premises by overcoming the challenges of silos data and interoperability.

Every interaction in a healthcare environment creates new data. In 2016, the amount of health information was doubling in every three years; by 2020 it is estimated to double every 73 days¹. Moreover, the data collected in these systems provides ample opportunity to analyze and facilitate for reporting, predictive analytics, and in data-driven decision-making more efficient and seamless.

As we move towards more collaborative care models, patient safety becomes a collective responsibility of everyone involved in the healthcare ecosystem. Effective care coordination has its roots in concise and clear communication between connected providers and security of these communications as they relate to highly sensitive patient data.

With ever-increasing health data from personal fitness trackers, connected medical devices, implants and other sensors that collect real-time information, the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime, equivalent to 300 million books¹. Hospitals, payer, pharmaceutical and other potential users of medical data need to gain an understanding of the type of data generated and the criticality of that data to the business. PHI related should be encrypted so as not to compromise the business, create unsafe patient conditions or impact privacy rights.

Bradley Evanoff and their colleagues from Washington University School of Medicine proved in their research that any failures in communicating among healthcare providers can lead to medical errors and deteriorate the quality of care.

Connected care that provides channels of communication between providers is critical today due to higher levels of patient acuity, shorter stays, use of unlicensed care providers, and the fragmentation of accessed care services across multiple providers.

The healthcare ecosystem must embrace a shared responsibility and imbue a collaborative culture of security. Working together will give all stakeholders – payers, physicians, administrators, patients and manufacturers – the necessary tools, training and confidence to make well-informed risk management decisions resulting in higher quality of care and an ultimately safer and more secure connected health community for all.

The ITC Infotech Advantage

As the number of connected devices continues to grow in healthcare environments, health system needs a robust strategy to build a secure and well-connected ecosystem that provide the last mile care delivery with seamless experience.

Improving healthcare is not a singular effort. You need assistance from specialists who can plan a roadmap for you and make transformation seamless. With our healthcare technology experts, you can make the shift from legacy systems to on-cloud cutting-edge technologies.

Moving toward a connected and safe healthcare ecosystem is the need of the hour and we can facilitate the change for you.