The healthcare domain is experiencing a rapid technology aided transformation. The western healthcare market continues to be open minded about embracing new technologies, experimenting with them and knocking out unsuccessful ones after thoroughly putting them to test. Healthcare providers continue to view all technologies from a financial standpoint, trying to assess the potential short term monetary incentive for adopting the same. However, a few thought leaders in the space, with a long term vision, are seeing investment in Healthcare IT as a means to improve their services and offer a more patient centric care.
The race to technology adoption will be triggered by the inherent competition that arises from technology adoption
1. The years to follow will see extensive health data sharing between patients, doctors, specialists, pharmacies, labs, hospitals and other stakeholders in the healthcare domain. This sharing will be facilitated due to the emergence of centralised health record systems that provide seamless access to a patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) that has the patient’s complete health history right from past health conditions to the latest doctor consulted.
2. Social Media will grow to become an integral part of marketing and will not be seen as an additional activity but rather as a means to do marketing online. It will be a tool that will also outgrow its current marketing use case and will add value in multiple other areas as listed below
- awareness creation campaigns that aim to provide preventive healthcare
- will bring patients and their doctors closer by strengthening their relationship
- help people discover communities that they can be part of where they can learn from each other and offer support
- hospitals can engage with their patients to improve their quality of service
3. ‘There is an app for that‘ culture will be more common place in the Healthcare space with several thousand apps available for people to teach themselves about specific health conditions to keeping track of their personal fitness. These apps will foster networking among patients and healthcare professions and make it easy for patients to get personalised advice from health experts for their problems.
4. Telemedicine will play a critical role in bringing healthcare to underserved areas of the country. It will help create a truly decentralised healthcare system. Healthcare players will see higher cost savings and greater profits in telemedicine.
5. Content will continue to be King – Healthcare players will go the branded content way to provide valuable health related information & tips and use this as a means to brand themselves among their audience.
In addition to the above mentioned ones, healthcare domain will see an increase in uptake of cloud based technologies and SaaS based applications. With massive amounts of health data that need to be processed, Big Data will also make a huge entry in healthcare. Wearable technologies for personal fitness such as the Nike fuel band, jawbone UP or Fitbit are fast gaining momentum and can soon be seen on people all around us.
