How to Create a Foundation for Digital Healthcare

As healthcare companies look to digital technologies to satisfy growing demand and solve gaps in overall performance, there are two questions they must answer: what fundamental, foundational steps are necessary to prepare our IT infrastructure for digitization, and what steps are necessary to build a platform for digital healthcare? Before healthcare companies begin a transformational digital journey, they must define success. Healthcare organizations that define S.M.A.R.T. objectives for their business are more successful in achieving their goals. Map out your enterprise architecture and business capability requirements. Digital healthcare requires thinking clearly about your future digital services, products and innovative processes as well as your current IT landscape. Once you’ve determined your required business capabilities, enterprise architecture and corresponding technology alliances and strategic partners, execute strategic investments that move you closer to those objectives.

Once the technical, commercial and operating models are in order, enterprises can build a digitized healthcare platform, following these five steps: For example, you could centralize IT infrastructure and shared applications operations while moving specific applications closer to the respective business departments. The platform and infrastructure necessary to deliver the many promises of digital healthcare must be capable of being scaled across an enterprise and its ecosystem. Healthcare firms must carefully assess, understand and follow the overall IT strategy and the specific needs of their business as they build applications and the standardized infrastructure that will make it possible to fully pursue digitization. With standardized infrastructure and scalable applications, healthcare firms can build new products and services (with additional revenue streams) based on the existing portfolio at a faster pace than the competition; scale proven and valuable services; leverage all data across the enterprise and deploy existing and experienced teams with a clear focus, and ultimately deliver better healthcare outcomes.