Imagine a coffee shop barista receiving a request for 100 different drinks. They’ll most likely become anxious, make mistakes with orders, and spill milk all over the place. A robot barista capable of preparing 200 cups of coffee every hour supplemented a coffee shop’s workers in Japan.
Instead of drink orders, the healthcare business is juggling patient care in the face of pandemics, staffing shortages, and escalating costs. Similarly, implementing technology can aid in the support of these crucial public sector employees.
How can technology enable healthcare providers to provide high-quality treatment that prioritises patients? Peter Williams, Oracle’s APAC Healthcare Advisor, discusses how data analytics and artificial intelligence can improve the patient experience.
Healthcare’s Upcoming Challenges
“In terms of healthcare changes, we’re in the midst of a massive moment of turbulence,” Williams adds. The healthcare industry has two issues in keeping up with the rapid rate of development.
To begin with, there is a severe scarcity of healthcare professionals. Janil Puthucheary, Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for Health, revealed that healthcare personnel are quitting. According to the Minister, approximately 1,500 healthcare employees quit in the first half of 2021, compared to 2,000 pre-pandemic.
Williams claims that the global healthcare workforce was already overburdened prior to the pandemic, particularly in industrialised countries where chronic disease and ageing populations are on the rise.
Second, hospitals must change their payment models to remain viable. Around the world, public health systems
Making healthcare more patient-centered
Williams emphasises the need of hospitals being patient-centered. This entails comprehending the entire healthcare journey through the perspective of the patient. Instead than using a one-size-fits-all strategy, the healthcare service is tailored to the patient’s specific needs.
Understanding the supply chain isn’t just about the procurement process when it comes to delivering a patient with a medical gadget, for example. According to Williams, you must also know which patient received the equipment, for what purpose, what maintenance is required, how to handle product recalls, and so on.
Data, not just clinical data, is critical for enabling patient-centricity. It lets employees to keep track of how many medical supplies are being used up, such as bandages, and replace them in a timely manner to avoid delays. HR data also aids hospitals in ensuring that enough clinical staff is available to satisfy patient demand in times of need while maintaining service quality.
What can hospitals do to make their data more patient-centric? Hospitals must examine both their front- and back-office systems, as well as their impact on the patient journey, according to Williams. However, with 20 systems covering different areas of the process, this isn’t practicable, making it unsustainable and costly to maintain. Wherever possible, modern solutions use a platform approach.
Data Analysis and Use of AI Technology
Hospital processes can be made more efficient by using data analysis and AI. Oracle tools help hospitals do this. With the help of AI technology, the data becomes a practical insight. Oracle software can use AI to make recommendations to employees in providing healthcare services.
For example, an application can create charts and reports, and AI can automatically inspect and analyze the data. ” You can also use data science to generate information, but you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand it,” he adds.
When medical resources such as vaccines are scarce during a crisis, hospitals need to use AI to scale up when they may be used, taking into account other factors such as availability. You can also model and predict the presence. The number of staff who actually administer the vaccine.
Sejong Clinic, a heart hospital in South Korea, leveraged Oracle tools to streamline and deliver critical patient data in real time. This allows medical staff to make life-saving decisions in minutes, which previously took hours. With 22 hospitals across the United States,
Adventist Health has upgraded all processes to Oracle Cloud to centralize financial and human resource operations. Data analysis allows you to quickly generate financial forecasts and reduce your budget timeline from 6 months to 3 months.
It is important to understand the following key technology trends and how the healthcare industry can leverage them in the future. Oracle has released a series called Modern Best Practices-Predicted that explores how technology can transform healthcare in the future.
How software as a system (SaaS) can help hospitals
Software as a service (SaaS) is a software solution that is developed and maintained by a cloud service provider, where organisations only need to pay for what they use. SaaS tools offer benefits in three ways compared to current on-premise software in hospitals.
First, SaaS software is regularly updated, so organisations can enjoy the newest digital capabilities. “If you’ve got a SaaS solution, then every quarter, you are getting all the current functionality,” Williams explains. Hospitals can take advantage of the newest innovations to get ahead of the curve.
The regular update process also means that there is no disruption in workflows that occurs with annual on-premise upgrades. Hospital processes can fit in closely to the medical staff’s work and not distract them from their primary task, Williams says. This is especially important as clinical staff will only become busier due to current shortages of labour.
Second, SaaS software is scalable, so it can be easily adjusted depending on the organisation’s demands and operations. When planning the hospital’s activities, hospitals can use SaaS solutions to quickly plug into business needs at any level, William shares.
Third, when the SaaS software is built on a single cloud platform it lets the management team know everything that is going on in the hospital in one glance by drawing on the combined data from all sources It also allows hospitals to easily get the data they need across multiple departments.
In hospitals, where a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death, data analytics and AI are life-savers. Healthcare providers no longer need to spend unnecessary time dealing with administrative processes that can be easily automated with technology. They can finally focus on what lies at the heart of healthcare—caring for patients.