How digital transformation is shaping the healthcare industry

By: Monica Venancio , CCaaS Sales Specialist – LATAM da Talkdesk


We have certainly become very repetitive when we say that 2020 and 2021 were challenging times for all industries. These challenges forced us to rethink everything that has been done in the health area. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven a digital transformation that directly impacts the way patients’ needs are met by healthcare professionals.


At the heart of this transformation is the intersection of digital innovations and human interactions designed to confidently and empathize with the demands of patients and frontline workers/caregivers. And, the key to success is creating a strategy or orchestrating an experiment to determine what should be accomplished through human interaction – and what need not be.


Innovating to reduce the repetition of interactions for both patients and healthcare professionals allows already stressed care teams to deliver critical services at times far from normal. In addition, this digital agility alleviates the patient’s efforts.
In this sense, a good first step for this is to create a solution in digital care that understands more about your patient and that brings the necessary automations to him, like a bot, to deal with repetitive tasks, such as re-sending recipes or procedures, appointment reminders, care facility referrals, delivery of lab results, patient identity verification, as well as more complex tasks such as personalized nursing triage protocols, for example.


If designed correctly, this automation also reduces fulfillment frustrations. This is because teams no longer have to deal with these interactions and the patient, in turn, does not have to work as hard to complete the desired tasks. However, ensuring that this experience is personalized, humanized and non-linear (ie not cold and robotic) is an important differentiator.


It’s also critical to design digital experiences into these workflows to include human interactions when needed. Healthcare must adopt a system with a digital face and voice on many occasions, but still keep it real.
Providing patient care anywhere is also critical. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced patients to adopt telecare, and the number of these interactions has increased 50-fold, by conservative estimates from pre-pandemic years. And, most healthcare executives believe that 25% of current outpatient, preventive, and long-term care interactions could go virtual in the next few years.

See more: LatAm commitment unchanged despite recent exits: Softbank


With this new landscape, a robust mobile and video-enabled telemedicine ecosystem must be part of any healthcare provider strategy now — and in the future. Careful planning and execution are crucial to reducing pressures on hospitals, more efficiently allocating healthcare resources, and improving patient experiences.


What about the role of Cloud platforms in orchestrating the patient experience? Where do they fit?


The accelerating need to deliver virtual services in healthcare has driven a historic increase in our reliance on cloud applications and the ability to access services through personal devices. Underpinning this delivery is an architecture built for a scalable environment that is flexible, agile, and secure. It must have consistent and resilient operations across multiple regions with low latency for machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data services. It also needs to be open to allow service choices and embrace a broader service ecosystem.


An elastic enterprise that spans private and public clouds—and provides a consumable healthcare development experience—must inform any strategy that seeks to transform healthcare. Most healthcare organizations are already stakeholders in the cloud because it is a business imperative in the always-on healthcare system.


The connected health journey


Providers must ensure they deliver a connected healthcare experience journey across all channels – voice and digital – and in every interaction. These integrated and connected care experiences across patient activation and access, care planning, treatment and discharge, and ongoing health monitoring must be humanized, personalized, and secure. And that continuity of care is best enabled through state-of-the-art shared data and interoperable solutions.


The fact is that healthcare organizations need to understand and derive patient intent to drive personalization of their care, understanding which media this patient prefers, bringing meaningful interactions and next-best actions. In addition, suppliers must be prepared to to drive continuous improvement through analytics, journey management and voice of the customer KPIs.