How Digital Twins Can Accelerate Healthcare Transformation

Digital twins offer real-time reporting to support informed, risk-based assessments and data-driven decision-making to improve operations and mitigate risks. But digital twins will do more than improve business operations. With healthcare under unprecedented pressure, providers can deploy digital twins to better navigate our “new normal” and operate more nimbly while continuing to meet the standard of high-quality patient care. Digital twins can mitigate this through better predictive analytics based on combining internal and external data tracking patient flow internally and forecasting potential spikes using external data including population demographics and morbidity, community disease prevalence and transmission, and more. Collected and visualized through a digital twin, this data can enable providers to think more strategically about capacity and resources based on better forecasting improving patient care as well as operational efficiency and profitability. Digital twins can give providers real-time visibility into how these increasingly connected devices are utilized, their performance and the need for repair before a critical breakdown puts patients at risk. While the growth of digital twins beyond industrial settings is accelerating, many organizations will struggle with where and how to start their strategies, given the potential impact on both operations and, in the case of healthcare, service delivery.