In recent decades, the world has witnessed the rise of SARS, Zika virus, Swine flu, Ebola, and now COVID-19. Epidemics and pandemics are a rising threat. Countries have made infrastructure a priority to safeguard their people and systems from physical disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes. But the methods they have used to fend off infectious diseases are not enough to ensure the safety of people and the availability of essential healthcare resources during pandemics.

A Pandemic That’s Ahead of Its Time

It has been almost a decade since the government passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The healthcare industry has learned a lot in this period of payment reforms and administrative changes. Yet, have we implemented the operational shifts needed for true value-based care? Whether or not there is a longing for the simpler times of fee-for-service medicine is debatable, one thing is for sure — value-based care is here to stay — and it’s likely to become more entrenched in the decade to come. 

Amazing, breathtaking, reformative, groundbreaking. No single adjective suffices to describe how 2019 changed US healthcare. With the end of the decade, we saw innumerable events happening — from massive health information technology mergers to new major government regulations. 

Healthcare data storage will be touching the zettabyte-scale in the coming years with increasing services and patients. Every year, a significant amount of data is generated from medication administration records, lab records, EHRs, wearable health devices, and various other sources. 

Healthcare continues to ride on the digital transformation trends to refine data management and care delivery processes. Health organizations are increasingly leveraging real-time data-driven solutions, artificial intelligence, and cloud services to empower their patients and clinicians with analytics and align with the culture of preventive and wellness-centric care.

As healthcare is becoming increasingly patient-centric, post-episodic patient engagement has arisen as a crucial element of care delivery. Not only is physician reimbursement getting linked to patient experience metrics but also care quality and utilization are impacting health networks’ drive towards value-based care. Together, the trend towards more patient engagement is impacting patients along each step of their care journey.

Technology was always meant to empower healthcare practices; action needs to be taken where it is causing more harm than good. Aiming for a single goal of better population health, we need a technology that understands value-based care, is humane to the providers and care teams, and acts as a reliable source of decision-making for the leadership. 

The provider community burns midnight oil to improve patient outcomes and further the dream of value-based healthcare. However, if you take a look at the average healthcare utilization expenditure, chronic diseases account for 75 percent of all healthcare spending. That’s more than $3.5 trillion alone, and every 6 out of 10 US adults is living with a chronic condition. Given the fact that managing chronic diseases occupy a large chunk of the nation’s average healthcare spending, a myopic approach isn’t going to help in the future. By 2030, the US would be accommodating to the healthcare needs of 77 million+ people above 65 via Medicare. 

When the concept of digital hospital and EHRs first came into the picture, the initial goal was to enhance the efficiency of back-office operations. However, EHR adoption continued to increase post-implementation of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) in 2009. Now after almost a decade, digitization in healthcare has continued to evolve, and electronic records have started serving a higher purpose than being a handbook for patient records. Thanks to continuous improvements in healthcare technology, smart hospitals are here to lead the future of care management and boost patient engagement in the process.