Digital Will Disrupt Siloed Healthcare Ecosystems in 2018

For those who have alarm fatigue from all the times disruption has been predicted for our industry, but never came to fruition, this time is different. All the drivers for change remain –cost, quality, regulatory — but unlike times past, the disruption is already underway. This year’s predictions report details the looming digital disruption to the healthcare industry and how healthcare organizations must re-evaluate their investments.

In 2017, we saw the clinical research experience disrupted as academic medicine, pharmaceutical and medical device companies pivoted their research to leverage Apple’s ResearchKit technology for app-based, digital research. This step forward has allowed us to engage research participants with connected devices and capture information in the home that would previously have required a face-to-face encounter. Integrating social data will unlock the next phase of digital disruption. Companies like patientslikeme are mature enough now to partner with healthcare enterprises to enable not only social sharing for patients, but enable better research recruitment.

And as cool as this is on its own, it is the proof the industry needed to confidently step forward and build digital experiences to engage our customers the way other industries have for more than a decade. HIPAA compliant frameworks exist and are ready to be leveraged for those organizations sick of limiting technologies, like Epic’s health record, which force health systems to continue to use paper processes for patient workflows.

What it Means

Stop Waiting For EHRs To Grow Up And Find New Vendor Partners To Go Digital

We have been waiting for Epic and other laggard organizations to take the billions of dollars investments we have made in their systems and bring us interoperability and digital healthcare. But it is time to give up the ghost. Even if they could get us there, the cost and time it would take are unaffordable to an industry that has lagged behind for far too long. Digital isn’t just for the academics and big pharma-it is available to all of us in healthcare today. Enterprise health cloud vendors are ready to show you the future of healthcare, and that future is a digital world where we can connect patient experiences across today’s siloes and drive better cost, quality and satisfaction outcomes. The future is now. Don’t be left behind.

Thoughts or questions on any of this? Always happy to chat, reach out to Kate McCarthy @Healthcare_Kate or kmccarthy@forrester.com.