Insights
The Ultimate Guide on Digital Healthcare Consumerism
The healthcare sector is transforming in an unprecedented way. Many factors are fueling this transformation and consumerism is one of them. It plays a decisive role in the healthcare sector by inspiring patients to become pure consumers of healthcare. As a result, the healthcare sector is evolving from an ailment-care industry to a patient-driven industry where patients are completely involved in the decision making process for their health.
Today’s patients consider more options and knowledge before making any decision. They are conscious of their consumer rights. Hence, they are fully capable of making the best decisions while acknowledging the quality and cost of various healthcare services as they do before considering other commodities.
With such transformation, healthcare has been facing many challenges in adapting technologies at a fast pace. The primary problem is that while adopting new technologies, the existing operation should not get disturbed. For example, for hybrid cloud migration, a healthcare institution can’t go for a halt.
Just like this, there are many barriers to technology adoption of healthcare institutions. In essence, it is one of the most critical sectors to grow fast with technology adaptation.
Some of the critical healthcare issues as per 2020 HCEG are discussed below:
1. Patient experience: It is the core pillar of the idea, ‘the best healthcare experience’. Healthcare institutions are facing major challenges in retaining patients. The concept of ‘self-service’ for patients has not seen huge adaption. Additionally, an absence of a centralized location for the healthcare institutions having branches in multiple locations hampers in accessing the up-to-date data. Non-real-time update of historical data of patients is one of the key problems of the sector.
2. Transformation. Delivery system :There is a lack of scaling and operationalizing coordination of both medical and non-medical services via partnerships between community-based organizations and healthcare. It is also affecting the delivery system transformation.
3. Data and analytics:Healthcare organizations need to leverage advanced analytics and new sources of unstructured and disparate data like labs, history, Rx, mHealth, geographic, IoT, Socioeconomics, etc. It will help to enhance health outcomes by reducing administrative costs and improve clinical decisions.
4. Interoperability & patient record access: Integrating and enhancing the exchange of data of member, payer, patient, provider, and workflows are the need of the hour. It helps to bring safe data (financial, admin, and clinical) accessibility & sharing in real-time.
5. Holistic individual health: There is a gap in detecting, addressing and enhancing the patient’s complete medical, socioeconomic, lifestyle/behavioral, cultural, educational, geographic, financial, and environmental well-being for connected healthcare experience.
6. Price transparency: Lack of price transparency is a big concern in the healthcare industry. Price transparency was a serious buzzword in 2019. If healthcare costs are transparent, the patients can research before making any decision.
7. Next Generation Payment Models: Patients are demanding new-age payment models like bundled payments, disbursement to health insurance providers, global payments, and shared savings, etc. However, implementing such payment models is a major challenge for all healthcare organizations in terms of technology adaption and change management.
8. Care accessibility: The healthcare industry needs to extend the point of care via telehealth, wearables, mHealth, digital devices, retail clinics, micro-hospitals, home-based care, etc.
9. Healthcare policy: Healthcare organizations need to adopt the latest health policies and regulations. Some of such policies are FHIR standards, HIPAA, and other mandates.
10. Data privacy/security: Patients’ data is sensitive. Hence, healthcare organizations are major targets for cybercriminals. More than 350 data was breached exposing 4.93 million patient records in the US (2017). And this trend has not slowed down and the year 2019 experienced breaching a 32 million patient record.
11. Data-driven decision: The data in healthcare comes from multiple sources and multiple formats. Presently, there is a lack of infrastructure that can store, retrieve, and analyze this data in various sources. To harness the power of big data, healthcare organizations should embrace data-driven decision making.
Additionally, there are many other factors like pressure on pharmaceutical prices, outside market disruption, increasing healthcare costs, frequent changes of healthcare regulations, staffing shortages, etc. are creating a huge bottleneck in offering high-quality healthcare services. One of the RX Savings Solution reports revealed that approximately three dozen drug producers increased medicine prices by 6.3% and at the same the US economy was inflating at 2.2% in 2019. Hence, an increase in the medicine price led to the gradual growth of prescription spending.
Parkar for Healthcare Consumerism
At Parkar, we lay the technology foundation for all kinds of healthcare institutions to bring healthcare consumerism in all the patient touchpoints. With healthcare consumerism, we can see an urgency to deliver healthcare services more efficiently.
Consumerism in healthcare has encouraged healthcare providers to embrace flexibility, speed of change, and adaptability in their services to survive in this competitive environment. In essence, the goal of health consumerism is to empower patients to make independent healthcare decisions by themselves. Parkar Digital with its technology platform, helps healthcare partners achieve the following:
- Enables close communications and cooperation between physicians and their patients
- Enhance buy-in and compliance of patients with treatment recommendations
- Maximize patients’ knowledge and awareness on lifestyle and wellness practices
- Concentrate more on preventative medicine by inspiring healthy activities and habits
At Parkar, we architect three cloud platforms fusing hybrid cloud and patient psychology under the umbrella of the Parkar Digital Platform. We use the following platforms to build the foundation of healthcare consumerism:
| Parkar Digital Platform | ||
| NexGen Cloud Platform | Intelligent Data Platform | Patient Experience Platform |
| Provides the foundational layer for digital modernization for apps and data. | Provides the Unified data layer to support Clinical Decision Support, Operational Analytics, and Interoperability. | Drives higher engagement and experience. Bridge the gap between physicians and patients with 360-degree visibility of the information on a centralized platform. |
The path to digital healthcare consumerism runs across these three main layers and converges with patients. The core layer is the foundational platform that modernizes the apps and websites. As the next step, we build a unified data layer to offer insights and interoperability. Finally, we use this combination of three digital platforms to deliver exceptional customer experience. Our platforms are built on high tech technologies to accelerate modernization, containers, AI, ML, and microservices.
We infuse new-age technologies with healthcare values in 2-12 weeks.
To accomplish the above capabilities and more similar healthcare values, Parkar healthcare IT services include the following segments:
Parkar Digital Foundation Platform
Parkar Digital Foundation Platform is empowered with all modern and required technologies that enable a healthcare organization to offer digital and hassle-free healthcare services. Our digital platforms are built with three core values such as an efficient system of engagement, interoperability, and HIPAA compliance.
- An efficient system of engagement: It enables a high level of engagement amongst healthcare professionals to offer seamless patient services.
- Interoperability: It enables the digital platform to exchange information over secure APIs.
- HIPAA compliance: We adhere to the guidelines of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). It enables us to offer data privacy security for all the medical information.
- Patient experience: The Parkar Digital Platform enables you to offer a 360-degree view of patient data with self-service, hybrid inward, and outward models to enhance the digital patient experience.
Although the technologies are evolving fast every day, healthcare institutions are still using outdated communication methods and technology. According to a recent study, major US hospitals lost a total amount of $8.3 billion every year for sticking to old technologies.
The Digital Platform of Parkar helps the healthcare institutions to save dollars by facilitating digital transformation efficiently. This platform is a polyglot and allows multiple technology adaptions to implement horizontal and vertical business scaling.
With the Parkar Digital Foundation Platform, there is a defined roadmap and process set to get started on healthcare digitization and capability building journey.
Define Value:
- Plan business value
- Define business need and ROI
- Onboard and adjust business sponsor
Reflective Pilot:
- Data imputation and conversion
- Models of data trained and backtested
Predictive Experiments:
- Define predictive models
- Visualize and customize reports
- Custom API development
Custom Outputs Deployment and Integration:
- Enterprise-wide deployment
- Third-party integration
- Cross use case adoption within a solution
Features of Parkar’s Digital Foundation Platform
The below table shows how Parkar’s Digital Foundation Platform helps to scale your healthcare institutions with a 360-degree approach:
| Healthcare Cloud | It offers 360-degree views to connect and engage every patient, employee, member, and partner. Also, it gives a single view of all patients. |
| Microservices | It decreases app development time from months to days by segregation a large monolith app into management containers or divisions. This helps to develop and live apps faster by boosting the time to market. |
| Orchestration | We use new-age platforms to orchestrate the microservices by enabling interaction among the containers. You can increase containers as per new business demands via a few clicks. |
| Auto Scaling | We autoscale the clouds and containerized apps with the implementation of DevOps and AIOps.You can manage your cloud storage and containers with few clicks. It brings automation to your business by saving time. |
Patient 360° – Bringing Diverse Information into One View
The legacy health management systems are hardly capable of offering high-quality patient care. They are filled with errors, data entry, and duplicate works. Parkar can design and deploy an end-to-end patient care coordination system offering a 360-degree view of patient data, tasks, treatment timelines and history, progress, and future appointments-all in a bendable, extendable, and protected system.
Streamlining patient flow for this 360-degree view is essential.
Inward flow
We integrate the inward flow with the following touchpoints:
1. Personalized communications: We integrate the EHRs and other systems of record to identify, divide, and offer personalized communication to patients on their preferred channels. Patients also can control their experience with HIPAA-compliant self-service portals.
2. Care coordination: We boost care coordination by simplifying collaboration among the care teams with centralized, real-time visibility of patient records to provide providers access to crucial clinical and non-clinical insights that can enhance operational efficiencies.
3. Retail Innovation: Parkar has been a partner to many retail and eCommerce organizations helping them innovate and provide differentiated consumer service and experience. Our mission is to bring retail innovation to healthcare by providing technology solutions that can enhance patient care, provide 360 views, help with transaction tracking and analytics. We enable you to treat your patients like retail consumers. Already the healthcare sector has seen a huge big data investment. In 2021, the investment is expected to be $7 million. As patients’ demands are growing, modern patients want to have self-control on their health.
4. Risk stratification: With predictive analytics, the healthcare service providers can detect and predict which patients are at high risk for illness and actively manage those patients with suitable care-management programs.
Understanding the Patients’ Profiles
Understanding your patients is the first step towards building a patient-cared R&D. And profiling the patients is a crucial part. We design patient profile modules covering all the study-relevant parameters. By offering a bird’s eye view of the patient history, we help you to enhance the quality of clinical data trial and security.
Medical History
The Medical History pickups all recorded diseases of any patient since birth. It also offers detailed information on the categories, conditions, and disease status updates.
Graphical Patient Profile
We build the graphical patient profiles for easy understanding of visits, adverse events, and concomitant medication. Such graphical representation allows you to analyze all information in one place.
Patient Engagement & Retention:Building care management
Ensuring patient engagement and building loyalty is vitally essential for the long-term financial viability of your organization. Research reveals that it costs less than 90% to get the current patients to future care programs. Hence, building a patient retention program is mandatory.
Outward flow
Educating your patients along with caring is an important pillar of high-quality healthcare service. Around 15% of the 1.6 million freshly diagnosed chronic diseases emerge due to a lazy lifestyle. Hence, inspiring the patients to live an active and healthy life with good diet programs is essential for your healthcare organization.
This patients’ outward flow should be digitally enabled so that the patients can access the wellbeing services remotely.
Access to Care
The first is the only chance to create a lasting impression. Getting patients into the system efficiently and quickly is a major issue. The communication centers should offer seamless access to care in assisting an existing patient or helping a new patient in getting physician appointments and referrals. Moreover, various non-clinical services including daytime call management as well as after-hour answering service should be offered by the care centers. They can also offer marketing campaigns, class or event registration on the service line, follow-through on the community, and appointment reminders to the patients.
Care Delivery
Robust communication centers are the hearts of seamless patient communication. These centers should ensure that the patients are rightly connected to their desired program. Additionally, communicating the diagnostic test results and transition in care form the core in care delivery.
Explore the Mindset of Today’s Patients
With evolving healthcare practices, technology adaption is the key. The patients’ expectations are increasing and they demand more patient-facing services from the healthcare organizations. While enhancing healthcare and patient care with a Digital Platform, let’s have a look on some intriguing stats
Open API Driven Interoperability in Healthcare
The ability of software to use and exchange information is known as data interoperability. In healthcare, interoperability allows the information systems to fast exchange and use the information within as well as across organizational boundaries. The fast delivery of healthcare data is essential as the patients visit various healthcare practices and facilities. The benefits of open or public API in healthcare are:
1. Security: Open APIs offer security without limiting access to patient data across multiple devices and platforms. It also safeguards patient information against any external threats. Further, it minimizes application development time.
2. More storage space: Healthcare programs continuously communicate and exchange information with each other. When the applications continuously pull data from multiple sources, it can take up huge spaces on the devices. However, open API saves storage spaces on devices. It allows you to increase data storage with few lines of code.
3. Data exchange tracking: Open APIs allow you to know the data sources.
4. Increase revenue: As open APIs are available publicly for all developers, it enables any outside developers apart from the organization to access the same. Hence, you don’t need to hire new developers and it significantly increases the revenue.
Our Open APIs are created based on clear and documented industry standards that include FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). Parkar Health Open APIs provide secure access to the patient record using innovative industry standards like the HL7® FHIR® Standard. FHIR is the widely preferred interoperability standard, which is designed to make the exchange of healthcare data between systems with complete security.
Whichever way you choose to enhance healthcare, our platform offers you the right tools and data to assist you to create innovative applications.
Explore the Mindset of Today’s Patients
With evolving healthcare practices, technology adaption is the key. The patients’ expectations are increasing and they demand more patient-facing services from the healthcare organizations. While enhancing healthcare and patient care with a Digital Platform, let’s have a look on some intriguing stats
Open API Driven Interoperability in Healthcare
The ability of software to use and exchange information is known as data interoperability. In healthcare, interoperability allows the information systems to fast exchange and use the information within as well as across organizational boundaries. The fast delivery of healthcare data is essential as the patients visit various healthcare practices and facilities. The benefits of open or public API in healthcare are:
1. Security: Open APIs offer security without limiting access to patient data across multiple devices and platforms. It also safeguards patient information against any external threats. Further, it minimizes application development time.
2. More storage space: Healthcare programs continuously communicate and exchange information with each other. When the applications continuously pull data from multiple sources, it can take up huge spaces on the devices. However, open API saves storage spaces on devices. It allows you to increase data storage with few lines of code.
3. Data exchange tracking: Open APIs allow you to know the data sources.
4. Increase revenue: As open APIs are available publicly for all developers, it enables any outside developers apart from the organization to access the same. Hence, you don’t need to hire new developers and it significantly increases the revenue.
Our Open APIs are created based on clear and documented industry standards that include FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). Parkar Health Open APIs provide secure access to the patient record using innovative industry standards like the HL7® FHIR® Standard. FHIR is the widely preferred interoperability standard, which is designed to make the exchange of healthcare data between systems with complete security.
Whichever way you choose to enhance healthcare, our platform offers you the right tools and data to assist you to create innovative applications.
Clinical Analytics
It is one of the most significant areas of healthcare solution providers. The implementation of clinical analytics reduces medication errors, enhances population health, and allows smart health prediction.
1. Intelligent health analytics: We develop AI & ML algorithms to intelligently predict health analytics and personalized services. Our smart solution makes it easy to scan the history of each patient with optimum data security. Moreover, we apply AI algorithms especially to analyze big data to help the client make insightful decisions.
2. Centralized system: We create a suitable architecture to gather all raw data, classify them, and store them in integrated storage. We pull the data with API and native integration tools and process the data via a cold path. Then we transform the data into classified versions and store them in the safe cloud data Lake.
3. RPA implementation: At Parkar, implement RPA (Robotic Process Automation) for automating some predefined tasks and clinical/operational workflows. It speeds up the operational efficiency in healthcare organizations. We also implement healthcare bots to enhance patient care.
Intelligent Data Platform
We assist healthcare organizations to bring value with safe access to a data management process. Healthcare organizations require architecture to process data from several sources and route the information to various destinations. Parkar Intelligent Data-as-a-Service (iDaaS) helps to offer message consumption, inbound connectors, an action engine, a business rules engine, caching, federated access to data sources, and outbound connectors.
At parkar, we help healthcare organizations by offering iDaaS, clinical reasoning, and automated security & HIPAA compliance with the help of hybrid technologies. We have mentioned our data management services below:
| Description | Value Proposition | Parkar Offerings | Provider | Payer | Life Sciences |
| Intelligent Data Platform | Support businesses drive value and bring innovation by allowing access to information. | Fuse, AMQ, Runtimes, Process Automation Manager, 3Scale, OpenShift | X | X | X |
| Clinical Reasoning | Enable businesses to create and deliver self-service applications and allow decision and process-based solutions. | Fuse, AMQ, Open Data Hub, Process Automation Manager, 3Scale, OpenShift | X | X | X |
| Automated Security & HIPAA Compliance | An automation based compliance-as-a-code platform that assures healthcare organizations can offer industry standards-based compliance-driven solutions throughout their enterprises. | Satellite, Ansible, Insight |
About Parkar Digital
Parkar Digital, a Gold Certified Microsoft Azure partner, provides technology solutions for Digital Healthcare, Digital Retail & CPG. Our solutions are powered by the Parkar platforms built using Cloud, Opensource, and Customer experience technologies. Our goal is to empower a customer-first approach with digital technologies to deliver human-centric solutions for the clients.
THE AUTHOR
Amit Gandhi
As the Co-Founder and CTO for Parkar Digital, Amit leads the Technology and Engineering teams and is responsible for designing and implementing innovative technology solutions for clients across various industries.
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Parkar Digital is a digital transformation and software engineering company headquartered in Atlanta, USA, and has engineering teams across India, Singapore, Dubai, and Latin America.