Jan 4
2016
Consolidation, Integration and Digitization: 2016 Health IT Trends
Guest post by Jean Van Vuuren, regional vice president, Alfresco.
Hospitals, clinics and other healthcare organizations are constantly evolving due to the proliferation of technology, the increasingly digital workforce and advancing patient expectations. In addition to evaluating the constant flow of new technologies in the healthcare market, they must be nimble to meet the technological needs of healthcare workers and patients. In addition, the increasingly multigenerational workforce has varying requirements when it comes to technology, organizational culture and career progression. Finally, it is becoming more important for healthcare organizations to deliver a consistent patient experience. Today’s patient is better informed, more in sync with their health and expects a superior healthcare experience. To address these somewhat competing forces, healthcare organizations will focus on consolidation, integration and digitization in 2016.
Consolidation
Shared services is a growing model across industries, and healthcare organizations will follow this trend in 2016. This model allows organizations to consolidate tools and processes to meet a number of needs across their organizations. Hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities will look to take existing services and the tools that support them, and coalesce them into a more agile and flexible platform for IT solutions that support their entire organizations. For example, hospitals that have a system to manage EHRs and a different system to manage employee records may be able to use one, the other or an entirely new system to address both needs (and, potentially, others across the organization). The latter would obviously involve the decommissioning of legacy applications in favor of more robust tools that are open, have flexible deployment options and support mobility.
Integration
Similarly, healthcare facilities will only be able to meet the technological, organizational and clinical needs required today by employing tools that integrate not only with the systems they already have in place, but also with the tools that employees and patients use both personally and professional. And, in 2016, they will focus on integration, bringing in technology that can work with many other tools now and into the future. Using the example above, if a healthcare organization has an EHR system that they plan to keep, but they also want to get another system to manage employee records, they will seek to purchase a tool that integrates with their current EHR system. And for good reason.