Appendix C. Meeting health system IT goals

The healthcare industry faces challenges to keep up with a rapidly changing political, regulatory, economic, and technological landscape. Organizations need to improve their agility and ability to innovate by adopting technical systems that are flexible and adaptable to changing conditions.

The volume of healthcare data that organizations manage increases every year, bringing with it increased costs for storage, backup and recovery, database management, and computing power. At the same time, healthcare organizations face cost and regulatory pressures. As a result of these pressures, organizations often seek ways to reduce operational expenses while remaining compliant with regulatory requirements.

The following sections describe the ways in which a modern healthcare-data strategy can help organizations meet IT-related goals and requirements.

Improve agility and ability to innovate

Organizations in the healthcare industry need to be increasingly agile in order to succeed. The industry continues to see growth in the following:

Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly empowered in making care decisions, while payers and providers are exploring technologies such as home health monitoring, telehealth, and mobile applications.

It's important for healthcare organizations to have technological systems that are able to adapt to changing conditions, including unexpected changes in healthcare needs. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the healthcare industry, healthcare organizations, manufacturers, and educational institutions needed technologies that made it possible for individuals to work from safe locations. Many healthcare organizations also needed to massively scale up their operations to conduct research in basic sciences, clinical science, and public health sciences.

Reduce operational expenses

Healthcare organizations face medical professional shortages, healthcare accessibility issues, aging populations, increased substance abuse, and increasing rates of chronic disease. At the same time, they face pressure from patients to provide higher-quality care with lower out-of-pocket costs.

Governments around the world are evaluating or implementing payment reforms to help providers reduce costs and increase efficiency while improving outcomes and encouraging patient engagement. These programs are sometimes referred to as pay for performance, value-based care, or accountable care. These reforms, however, require detailed information about conditions, procedures, and expenses within a health system.

Healthcare organizations can both innovate and lower expenses by adopting a modern healthcare-data strategy. With a modern strategy, organizations can identify the data that they need to retain to meet regulatory requirements and remove superfluous data. They can also use archival-tier storage in the cloud to lower the cost of long-term storage. This archival data can be retrieved in a matter of hours for short-term usage, such as longitudinal studies or for generating population health statistics.

Modernize data storage and analytics

Over the past decade, the volume of healthcare data that organizations collect has increased exponentially. Healthcare providers and payers use this data to support advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence systems that improve the quality of care. Providers also use this data to more quickly and accurately identify and address risks to core operational and clinical workloads. Likewise, payers can assess risk more accurately and efficiently through the automation of claims processing pipelines. By using a modern digital front door that accommodates data from consumer health devices such as wearables, providers can better understand patient lifestyles and better predict health outcomes.

To use these large datasets effectively, it's important for providers to implement data-operations management systems. Also, to protect business continuity and resiliency, they need to create systems and processes that manage data security, data availability, and durability. They need data storage that is elastic (storage that can shrink or grow as data needs change). Storage systems should meet the performance requirements for a wide variety of workloads. Finally, systems should be optimized to create the necessary balance of access, persistence, and cost. A well-architected modern healthcare-data strategy can meet all of these requirements.