The healthcare landscape is ever evolving, and as marketers, it’s essential to stay ahead of the curve. Several challenges persistently surface, becoming stumbling blocks for many. Our industry experts aren’t just aware of these challenges, but are actively tuned into them, working to find the most efficient strategies and solutions to cut costs, increase margins, and build resilience.

Forrester reports that investments in customer experiences improve margins. However, industry headwinds have forced healthcare leadership teams to sharpen their strategic pencil and prioritize investments that are certain to drive results and deliver business value.

Marketers especially feel the brunt of this, striving to optimize their strategies amidst these challenges and seamlessly bridge the gaps in connection, care, and convenience for their audiences.

Opportunity: Attract and Retain Patients

Despite the breadth and depth of medical expertise, many healthcare providers grapple with visibility. In an age of instant information, it’s crucial for patients to find, access, and schedule services with ease. Ensuring you’re visible is the first step in establishing trust.

QUICK TIP: Revamp your find care journey – today’s patients prioritize proximity and immediate availability. Leveraging intelligent search tools, especially those powered by AI, not only refines and optimizes their paths but also ensures you are easily discoverable.

Opportunity: Maximize Data

Healthcare is swimming in data. From patient histories to real-time monitoring, the data points are vast and growing. But with this surge comes the challenge: How do healthcare leaders harness this information?

The potential value is undeniable, but capturing and compliantly leveraging it effectively, especially without straining resources, remains a significant hurdle.

QUICK TIP: Dive into your organization’s data governance and data management strategies. Consider how marketing initiatives can not only draw from, but also actively enhance your enterprise’s overall data reservoir with unique insights.

Opportunity: Reduce Operational Costs

Every marketer is tasked with the challenge of doing more with less. With rising operational expenses and the need for innovative marketing techniques, striking the right balance between budget and efficacy is a constant juggle.

QUICK TIP: Shift the focus to cultivating a shared vision across the organization. While it’s challenging to design and monitor collective goals and KPIs, embracing them is pivotal. It prevents falling into restrictive team-based silos and mere box-checking, steering toward holistic success.

Opportunity: Stop the Bleed of Referral Leakage

Ensuring patient retention and managing referrals efficiently is paramount. Referral leakage not only impacts the bottom line but can also hamper the patient’s care journey, leading to fragmented care experiences.

QUICK TIP: It’s essential to identify, as precisely as possible, where leakage occurs. Implement flags for follow-up communications to reassure and re-engage, ensuring no patient slips through the cracks. Create open lines of communication among patients, physicians, and hospital operations.

Success In Action: Better Data Powers Healthcare Marketing Campaigns

Build Business Resilience – Your Path Forward

While these challenges may seem daunting, they’re not insurmountable. They highlight the imperative for improved collaboration across all touchpoints — encompassing not just the interactions your consumers have with you but also the interactions that various teams and stakeholders have amongst themselves in constructing a comprehensive picture of those consumers. Prioritizing ease of discovery, building trust, and facilitating seamless engagement with both patients and healthcare professionals is essential. This principle of nurturing robust relationships and promoting open communication underpins everything we champion for our clients.

Discover how you can reduce costs and boost margins. Explore our strategic position on patient-centric find care experiences. Or download our guide to master the intricacies of healthcare.

For years, people have posed questions along the lines of “when will digital health or virtual health just become health?” The premise being that digital is becoming so central to healthcare that the adjective “digital” is implied and therefore redundant. 

But maybe that’s the wrong question. 

If the quadruple aim is now the quintuple aim with health equity, the new fifth line, maybe the question is instead “When does digital health just become equitable health?” 

Making Digital Health More Equitable

Positioning the question from this different angle, the premise is simply that everything we currently do in digital health is arguably already about making healthcare more equitable and effective to and for each and every person. For example, a non-exhaustive sample might be:

• In expanding and orchestrating virtual health, we are seeking to make the most appropriate and effective tools available at the right time and place and with appropriate context and support for every patient.
• In addressing patient experience across digital and physical environments, we work in journey sciences to make the right information as accessible, relevant, appropriately engaging, and timely as possible to engage the right people in the right way. 
• In the back-end, ongoing efforts to enable better interoperability between our digital assets are largely driven by desires to, for example, target clinical decisions, make clinical decisions more informed and timely, draw inferences in marketing so we can carefully and safely communicate messaging, and suggest what will be most beneficial to patients (and hopefully to our businesses as well, but in that order). 
• Arguably, the many efficiencies we seek to drive adoption of AI either free up precious resources (care professionals, navigators, call center reps, etc.) to be available to the right people at the right time, or accelerate the benefit of virtual health, journey sciences, interoperability in DE&I by speeding up insights about how improve. 

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY: Healthcare PowerByte: Virtual Health – Creating Easy, Seamless, Loyalty-Building Experiences

Overcoming The Risk of Built-in Inequity

Given that digital health has such a massive potential impact on DE&I, we need to account for risk. The risk that if we build our digital tools without carefully considering DE&I throughout, we can inadvertently build inequity into the digital solutions we hope will transform healthcare by removing inequities. 

There are obvious, and well-researched, areas where this risk manifests – e.g. in the building blocks and training processes of AI or ML solutions. But the risks also arise in decisions around change management, governance, and softer, content decision aspects of deploying new digital capabilities. For example, what kinds of options do we layer into Find-a-Doctor filtering tools? How do we bridge the lines between competing norms that may vary between clients and regions? 

The bottom line is that if our starting point for everything is to lead with a DE&I lens to the topic, we are much more likely to build effectively having those goals in mind and, by definition, build more effectively overall. 

READ MORE: The “floats all boats” argument

Healthcare Leaders Turn to Us

Healthcare organizations play a key role in offering access to care, employing, and motivating skilled workers, and acting as social safety nets in their communities. They, along with life sciences organizations, serve on the front lines of addressing health equity. Perficient is dedicated to enabling these organizations to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within their companies.

Our healthcare practice is comprised of experts who understand the unique challenges facing the industry. The 10 largest health systems and 10 largest health insurers in the U.S. have counted on us to support their end-to-end digital success. Modern Healthcare has also recognized us as the fourth largest healthcare IT consulting firm.

We bring pragmatic, strategically-grounded know-how to our clients’ initiatives. And our work gets attention – not only by industry groups that recognize and award our work but also by top technology partners that know our teams will reliably deliver complex, game-changing implementations. Most importantly, our clients demonstrate their trust in us by partnering with us again and again. We are incredibly proud of our 90% repeat business rate because it represents the trust and collaborative culture that we work so hard to build every day within our teams and with every client.

With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Perficient is a trusted, end-to-end, global digital consultancy.

As we gradually emerge into a brave, hopeful, post-pandemic world, it is incredible to look back at the courage, tenacity and spirit the U.S. healthcare system has demonstrated in combatting the virus. The journey we have shared presented many points of frustration and despair, which makes it even more important to recognize the successes and the wins.

One of the most visible, tangible wins has been in the domain of virtual health. Over the past year, providers and payors have quickly enabled virtual visits’ astounding growth as a mission critical tool, connecting patients and members to caregivers during multiple lockdowns.

Impressive Growth in Virtual Visits

We have seen tenfold and greater growth of in total visits (depending on the provider), and Forrester estimates that as many as 41% of U.S. adults have had a remote primary care visit as of Q4 2020. This has been a huge boon for the virtual health industry’s growth. Forrester notes no less than 13 significant virtual care platform providers in its Wave report. And they run the gamut from monoliths like Microsoft, new cross-industry communications giants like Zoom, telehealth staples like Teladoc, and a host of smaller innovators.

All of this is reason to celebrate the long-anticipated era of innovation and growth happening now in virtual health.

A New Era in Virtual Health

Coming right behind virtual visits, we believe, will be an avalanche in the adoption of all things virtual – monitoring, digital therapeutics, personal connected health, etc. These are all industry areas that have had success in the past ten years and are well positioned to more fully mainstream than would have been possible pre-Covid.

So, what’s the problem?

The central issue we have seen emerge is one of orchestration. Many pieces of the ecosystem are already in place. Many experiences for patients and members encountering new options in their journeys are already effective, even compelling. Organizations’ ability to gather important insights has made great strides.

However, there are very few, if any, healthcare organizations that have come out of this hectic year with a shiny, fully-thought-through virtual health strategy that encompasses the full continuum of:

• infrastructure,
• experiences, and
• insights.

The sheer pace of change is exposing complex challenges for our clients, exposing three areas where, we believe, digital transformation can truly drive positive change in healthcare.

Innovating Hybrid Ecosystems

Virtual health’s growth creates enormous tension in organizations trying to manage the age-old ‘‘buy vs. build’’ question, with expectations shifting daily.

Our expertise in deploying industry-leading platforms and complex custom application development helps clients:

• Identify opportunities to develop key in-house capabilities with custom tools and applications
• Leverage major platforms in innovative ways to orchestrate your ecosystem
• Ultimately increase (and prove) ROI from a better orchestrated ecosystem of custom and third-party virtual health offerings

Curating Consistent Experiences

Virtual health’s proliferation is crowding an already-busy healthcare journey with new options, which makes curated journeys critical for customer stickiness.

Leverage our expertise in healthcare patient experience strategy, design, and implementation to:

• Guide patients through compelling journeys in an increasingly complex, yet rewarding, virtual health environment
• Enhance care professionals’ interactions and experiences and minimize impacts
• Ensure the experience catalyzes, rather than hinders, desired virtual health programmatic outcomes

Integrating Performance Analytics

Virtual health adoption poses many new performance and value questions, which many organizations are unequipped to answer.

We see yet more emphasis on integration strategies for analytics, aimed at unlocking cross-platform intelligence and insight. Healthcare companies need to be able to:

• Identify and prioritize virtual health programs based on patient needs and organizational priorities, using cross-platform analytics and BI
• Ensure compliant integrations allow data assets to complement one another effectively across analytics solutions
• Ultimately drive incremental valuethrough novel insights that have the potential to further enhance clinical and business outcomes

Grow Your Capabilities and Optimize Virtual Health Experiences

Ready to advance your virtual health maturity? Our healthcare experts can help. Contact us today to get started.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the reality quickly became apparent that many healthcare organizations were ill-equipped to fight the COVID-19 battle. Healthcare has been stretched to new limits in inpatient volume, equipment shortages, and the sheer number of calls, emails, and inquiries coming from the patients/members, media, and government.

So what has helped healthcare clients most rapidly respond to COVID-19?

Omnichannel, digitally centric interactions that draw upon the real-time power of AI. Additionally, virtual visit adoption and usage have increased exponentially across healthcare providers.

Digital health technology has quickly proven itself powerful in a wide range of use cases:

• Triage – Critical care needs demand priority attention. AI-enabled chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) have helped redirect the brunt force of phone calls and emails going in and out of medical offices and call centers, allowing staffing reallocations to what matters most: rapid and nimble health delivery.
• Care – Virtual and televisits, follow-ups, and consults redirect the number of in-person visits for patients with non-urgent symptoms. This proves particularly helpful when patients can be effectively treated at home, thus limiting exposure. Additionally, remote monitoring and support of high-risk populations such as the elderly, immuno-compromised, obstetric patients, and those with comorbidities reduce the risk of virus spread.
• Communication – Gathering and analyzing critical information is essential in prioritizing those who are high-risk and providing adequate resources where necessary. The pandemic also heightened the need to automate the distribution of educational materials, guidelines, and frequently asked questions (FAQ) to patients, healthcare members, and communities – not to mention providing real-time communication and informative updates to healthcare professionals on the latest hospital protocols and policies.

As the new normal emerges, there will be a broader role for digital coordination and management in healthcare, encompassing more than just virtual visits. The capabilities and technologies discussed in our new guide can support you with the deployment of rapid-response digital health solutions while in the reactive phase of COVID-19.

Learn more by downloading our guide, Rapid Response Technology Solutions for COVID-19. In it, we explore ways you can:

• Automate user interactions with chatbots
• Meet call center demand… at scale
• Cultivate rapid, tailored outreach powered by CRM.
• Boost existing resources with powerful enhancements
• Promote better health… delivered.
• Leverage technology for “extra hands” support

COVID-19 appears certain to be a long-term challenge, with successive, overlapping waves of surge and retreat.

Healthcare providers and payors remain immersed in the pandemic. Deaths and hospital admissions are well above normal levels, requiring emergency response measures to manage and care for thousands of patients.

Many questions, nuanced by geographic and demographic considerations remain: How will we prioritize care and recover revenue? How will subsequent surges and troughs create new challenges or opportunities? What will the new normal look like and when will it arrive?

Despite the uncertainty, the vital role of digital health is now more firmly established.

How that role comes to be defined remains an open question.

How will healthcare organizations embrace this opportunity to supercharge their digital assets and use them as a key pillar of future business resilience? We see responses developing in phases, initially focused on reaction and adjusting to the new reality. Thereafter, the long-term environment is now fully primed for digital health’s more central, dynamic role in meeting consumers’ evolving healthcare expectations.

Digital health will play a major role in the way healthcare will be conducted and managed going forward. To help guide you as you change from a reactive to a long-term proactive focus, our thought leaders have explored ways you can harness technology solutions in response to COVID-19.

A new guide assists you in the ongoing reaction phase: immediate responses that can be invoked with limited effort since they are available on-demand, as-a-service, and delivered digitally. They focus predominantly on swiftly implemented self-service, community support, communication, and outreach.

• Automate user interaction with chatbots
• Meet call center demand… at scale
• Cultivate rapid, tailored outreach powered by CRM
• Boost existing resources with powerful enhancements
• Promote better health… delivered
• Leverage technology for “extra hands” support

Learn more today by downloading our guide, Rapid Response Technology Solutions for COVID-19.

Previously, I highlighted artificial intelligence, and all the opportunities it brings to the industry. In the final blog of this series we explore data governance and its role in digital health.

Given the other four trends, one of the biggest challenges will continue to be obtaining executive buy-in for digital health initiatives. That means actively breaking down siloes, instilling risk-taking innovation in roles and responsibilities, and being comfortable with adaptive tension.

Healthcare has long been an odd duck in terms of innovation. On the one hand, there is continual groundbreaking discovery across clinical fields with new treatments, drugs, and protocols emerging all the time. By contrast, the patient experience of healthcare has actually changed remarkably little intrinsically in 50 years. Yes, it is changing rapidly now, but still in the context of normative consumer perception of the relationship between patient, physician, specialist, and insurer.

Increasingly, healthcare companies are challenging these norms. Not just by many start-ups focused on re-inventing and streamlining the patient experience (admittedly almost all focused on primary care, non-specialty or at least non-acute environments) —but also by incumbents, earnestly trying to redefine their images.

The task of those assigned with digital innovation at any provider is daunting. The reality is that digital health is no longer an interesting specialty topic. It is a priority. Nevertheless, invariably providers’ culture, organizational structure, and hierarchy do not reflect that importance and this results in impaired performance and under-powered leadership.

Digital governance is more than a team focusing on digital and it is more than a digitally savvy leader atop a group tasked with digital innovation. Digital governance has to be embedded in the vision, strategy, and mission, from top to bottom. It must be reflected in organizational structures that encourage and reward digital innovation.

The nutshell is (over)communication and (over)teaming. Individual physician adoption of digital innovations (from iPhone onward) has always far outpaced institutional adoption of the same capabilities. This is a telling sign. On an individual basis, physicians are equally—if not more—accepting of change than their patients, as compared with provider organizations. The reasons—risk, cost, etc.—may be obvious, but the relative appetite for risk in the field of patient experience and digital care delivery will change, and your organization can either be ahead of that curve, or behind it.

Questions to Consider

• Where does digital health fit in the purview of your senior executives?
• What do you believe to be the awareness of your senior leadership (clinical, operational, marketing, IT, etc.) of the role that digital health will play in the future success of your organization?
• Are your success metrics for your leadership aligned to promote or detract from digital health innovation and adoption?

To learn more about the top five digital health trends for providers, you can click here or download the guide below.

My previous blog installment described the opportunities with better analytics and patient experience. This blog will highlight artificial intelligence (AI), and all the opportunities it brings to the industry.

Despite the myriad of trend articles claiming a seismic change in healthcare as a result of AI applications, the reality of the impact we see is more deliberative. Most importantly, the impact of AI in healthcare is in value propositions, dependent on the other trends we have noted for their context and relevance.

There are two main areas where AI is impacting healthcare in meaningful ways.

First, the opportunity for virtual agent solutions cannot be underestimated. Provider, payer and pharma entities alike— and every other industry—continue to evolve their options for engaging prospects and customers in the most effective way. AI-enabled assistants are either already in use in a limited form or on the roadmap for organizations industry wide. The challenge typically has become not how to validate the value proposition, but where to draw the line in the range of interaction points that can be exclusively directed or influenced by the virtual agent. In other words, determining where to hand back to human interaction. In general, that decision is more rooted in risk aversion that it is in the capabilities of the AI, assuming it is trained appropriately.

Secondly, and possibly more critically for the long term impact of AI, the role it plays in the integration story in Trend 3 cannot be overstated. Targeted machine learning solutions that focus on the interpretation of vast swathes of data are the domain of early iterations of AI—clearly with huge value in the fields of clinical discovery. But the more functional (and perhaps more tactical) application of AI in the intelligent automation of the many steps found in data pathways, data quality assessment, and ultimately integration, is critical to the success of personalization initiatives in both care coordination and care delivery.

These trends in artificial intelligence put a spotlight on the quality of existing data sources in healthcare. Whether it is data associated with building specifications to support wayfinding initiatives or process data points to describe a customer process to be AI-enabled, AI solutions  can only be as good as the environment—specifically the data—they ingest at the outset. This becomes more complex as the range of digital health touchpoints for a health system expands.

Questions to Consider

• What are the realistic expectations you want to set for your patients in their virtual agent interactions with you? How effectively have you researched those expectations?
• What are the experiential dependencies or expectations you create by using virtual agents (e.g., “If it’s this easy to book an appointment, why do I have to call someone now that I need to get my insurance validated?”)
• How do you prioritize development paths for your AI-enabled interactions with patients or members?

To learn more about the top five digital health trends for providers, you can click here or download the guide below.

My last blog in this series outlined virtual consults and the major role they play today in the patient experience. Today, I focus on the opportunities with better analytics and patient experience.

The emerging Salesforce/Cerner relationship is one of many indicators of a new paradigm in the culture of—as much as of the mechanics of—interoperability. Major players are recognizing that there is more long-term value in substantive collaboration than in simple open APIs. The industry is finally moving past the perception that owning data (or at least preferential access to data) has a value in its own right, and recognizing that value is only achievable in multi-party relationships that enable data siloes to actually merge and create new insight.

As this plays out across healthcare, it has a number of specific impacts.

First, the importance and demand for API and microservices capabilities, and for healthcare-specific capabilities in FHIR, will continue to expand rapidly. (Demand will outpace supply in this regard for some time, but healthcare technology has a habit of right-sizing quickly.)

To achieve the goals of personalization, digital care delivery and healthcare informatics generally, data management and a culture of collaborative integration is no longer a nice-to-have—it is essential. Organizations that recognize this dynamic and promote a culture of collaboration internally, as well as in their interactions with other entities, will be well positioned.

Secondly, and more speculatively, this is obviously one of the areas where blockchain use cases may ultimately be proven out in healthcare, but it is by no means the panacea some thought it would be—yet. This is precisely because it still relies on the same issue: a culture of actual collaboration between distinct entities for a common, commonly defined, goal—with no opt-outs—to be effective. That is easier said than done, especially in the fragmented, competitive-to-a-fault, healthcare world from which we are trying to evolve.

Yes, the outcome of this trend will be felt in substantial improvements in the quality of analytics and resultant insight for health systems, but more importantly, it will be felt in the personalized patient/consumer experience that finally begins to match other industries. Much has been made of the “creepiness” factor in personalized healthcare interactions (for example, a family

inadvertently learning of a sensitive issue affecting an adolescent child by virtue of personalized content). The only way to address these issues will be through the deployment of more sophisticated personalization protocols which are, of course, dependent upon better data.

Questions to Consider

• Is your organization optimized from a technology perspective for collaborative data sharing between environments to drive net new insight?
• Is your organization optimized from a culture perspective for collaborative data sharing between environments to drive net new insight?
• How effectively does your organization partner with third parties from both a technology and culture perspective? Are you limited by your appetite for risk or by a lack of viable use cases for collaboration?

To learn more about the top five digital health trends for providers, you can click here or download the guide below.

Previously, I highlighted the importance of patient personalization. My next blog in this series outlines virtual consults and the major role they play today in the patient experience.

For years, projecting the market for virtual health was an exercise in futility. But virtual consults have finally become a relatively normalized component of healthcare delivery, albeit with most volume focused on lower-risk categories for now. This represents consumers’ familiarity and comfort with using established tools for video communication in a specific healthcare context.

Some elements of the business model challenges that dogged early years—reimbursement in particular—continue to complicate deployments, but from a consumer perspective, they are entrenched.

The next question is whether the comfort level with virtual consults will drive greater comfort with, and possibly faster maturity curves for, the adoption of the huge array of therapeutic area-specific solutions, synchronous and especially asynchronous, that emerge almost weekly. Experimentation, in small populations, of digital health tools to manage everything from migraines to multiple sclerosis has been undertaken for more than a decade.

Depending on the TA, these monitoring solutions have a wide disparity in adoption, but adoption is still well below 5% within condition populations that could benefit. As virtual consults become a staple interaction tool, the impact on adoption in asynchronous tools cannot be far behind.

In 2019, this storyline will begin to unfold more rapidly. Entities that are able to couple these tools with the more personalized patient experience discussed will address multiple challenges and stand out in the industry. Entities that are able to partner with emerging vendors to leverage data and insight generated from these encounters will be even better positioned on their path to value-based care.

That leaves the question of governance. In the context of digital care delivery this will drive much debate about the extent to which provider systems have to take on a curation role; a formulary role almost, in the adoption of digital health technologies. Already, AMCs and entrepreneurial-minded systems are a breeding ground for pilots of multiple solutions. At a certain point though, the leaders in this field will perfect mechanisms for getting emergent ideas to scale in their patient populations with a minimum of fuss, and the next stage of digital health delivery will have truly begun

Questions to Consider

• Are you thinking holistically about patient technology options, layering in virtual consults and the range of additional tools as one cohesive experience?
• Are you prepared to incorporate data from asynchronous tools? Do you have effective innovation relationships with emerging vendors?
• How does your governance culture—in particular with respect to experimentation in digital health promote interaction between clinical and operations in delivering outside pure clinical environments?

To learn more about the top five digital health trends for providers, you can click here or download the guide below.

In my last post, we discussed the challenges healthcare provider’s face. This post highlights the importance of patient personalization.

Achieving lofty patient experience goals remains an elusive goal for many healthcare organizations. In the portal domain, for example, 63% of patients in a recent Health Affairs study reported they had not used a patient portal in the prior year. Combined with data showing that only about half of the population have patient portal access at all, it is no wonder adoption is low.

Interesting insight is a key reason why adoption is so low. A key influence is certainly the quality and/or interest level in what is available to review. Information categories often appear comprehensive, but with minimal depth of information. Patients look at a lab result, search their condition, are taken to generic medical library content, then leave and don’t come back. “Personalization” extends to entering an email address on which to receive communication.

Embracing personalization across the patient’s digital journey—from portals to content management to curation of tools for digital care— is an exercise in choreographing three main capabilities.

Firstly, insight generated from multiple data sources—each with its own data quality and pathway considerations – identifies unknown and known users alike, targeting messaging and content to engage them. Secondly, with a “target” individual defined, personalization is about curation and positioning of existing services, widely defined, in a meaningful, timely and nonintrusive way. A key aspect of this is the growing focus on the intersection between Content Management System (CMS), CRM and EMR portal capabilities—as things stand, most instances of EMR portals cannot fulfill this role alone.

The final—and possibly the most challenging—aspect of personalization requires a recognition of the provider’s role in directing patients to relevant content, experiences, and services outside their direct remit—partnerships of relevance, third-party solution vendors etc. The latter can quickly generate big challenges in governance and needs to be managed carefully.

Done well, personalization has the potential to significantly change patient experience and flip the stats on patient interaction with the tools at their disposal by significantly improving the patient experience through personalized navigation and content.

Questions to Consider

• What information assets can you utilize to drive more engaging content in your patient portal?
• Where are the limitations in your relationship with your EMR portal provider? How can you partner with them to overcome technical challenges?
• What processes and structures do you have in place to ensure a coordinated approach to leveraging external relationships and partnerships in driving personalization?

To learn more about the top five digital health trends for providers, you can click here or download the guide below.

This blog series highlights the top five digital health trends for providers. This post looks at the challenges providers face.

Healthcare continues to face fundamental disruption as the industry navigates an uncertain path toward value and outcome-based care. Achieving the goals of these models requires the adoption of novel processes, tools, and technologies, all of which can be risky to execute. At the same time, patients are demanding more control over their healthcare and that they receive high-quality, affordable, accessible, and personalized care. Providers emerging from the path to value-based care and healthcare consumerism face challenges in three major domains: engagement, delivery, and insight.

With that in mind, this guide looks at five key and interrelated digital health trends impacting healthcare providers. Understanding these trends will help you navigate technology investments and transform data into powerful knowledge that can both enhance the patient experience and position your organization as a leader in next generation digital health.

Each of these trends also reflects the steady maturation of digital in the healthcare domain, as well as a growing comfort with more rapid evolution from experimentation to scale. The outlook for the continued beneficial impact of digital on patients and providers of emergent and established health technologies is undoubtedly positive.

However, the sheer breadth of capabilities that are becoming available to providers—in experience platforms, in analytics, in the delivery of digital care—often overwhelms traditional governance structures and operating models. The industry has, of course, responded, often by bringing in experience from outside of healthcare, where executives have seen the latter stages of this movie play out already. That will not be enough.

These five trends illustrate that there is still much work to do, but also that great opportunity awaits.

To learn more about the top five digital health trends for providers, you can click here or download the guide below.

This week is HIMSS 2019 bringing together more than 45,000 health information and technology professionals, clinicians, executives and vendors from around the world in Orlando, FL.

In the session “Creating a platform for digital health innovation”  it was great to learn about Google Cloud’s vision for a digital health platform with Jameson Rogers, PhD, Product Manager, Healthcare & Life Science, Google Cloud. The focus of the discussion was how digital health is transforming how medical professionals practice and how their patients receive care.
The potential for digital care delivery (and all the other use cases their team is digging into) is so great, and this will be another powerful catalyst for driving ever greater adoption. It’s about making the process of weaving digital health tools into consumers’ lives as straightforward as possible for healthcare companies – and being ready to turn the resulting deluge of data into insight.

This is 100% in line with Perficient’s view on driving Digital Health. We look forward to learning more and helping.