Last year was a very complex year in healthcare IT. The marketplace for healthcare was packed with 6.5 million Americans enrolled for health insurance. One of the other biggest headlines included Ebola outbreak. Among these all the events, health institutions carried out the integration of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) so that the patients and care providers can be engaged together through online tools. One thing which is going to remain constant throughout this year is evolution. Healthcare has evolved much but it is still in the middle of a lot of variations. The road toward digital information, personalized medicine & treatment and the empowered patient has to be journeyed more. In 2015, top five healthcare IT trends are believed to be the following:
Privacy and Security Concerns
Despite the regulation of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), last year forty two percent of all the serious data breaches were from healthcare. This is an alarming figure and the FBI predicts more troubled time in coming years. By 2015, fifty percent healthcare organizations will have experienced between one and five cyber attacks in last twelve months, with one third of those attacks successful. Such situation may be frightening for any American individual who is enrolled and has provided whole medical record as digitized one. At this time when health providing organizations are storming the health industry with electronic and computerized systems, the criminals see these all as an easy target to gain access to confidential information.
So in 2015 the top trend is the need to ensure that all the investment in auditing, protecting and thwarting attacks is made rightly and effectively. Moreover it has also become a significant need to identify and combat this kind of attacks as quickly as possible after they take place. The security preservers need to make sure that a comprehensive view of security and risk is being seenand right partners are pulled in to deploy holistic solutions.
Moving to the Cloud
It is estimated that by 2020, eighty percent of the health data will move to the Cloud at some point of time because care providers look to more cost effective and more mountable infrastructure. Additionally, this infrastructure would be secure hosted. As well as moving to the cloud is truly is top of the agenda with other popular trends like big data, personalized medicine, and new business requirements. For organizations to be much more strategic is necessary to execute an effective cloud strategy. Next to that is deployment of non-mission critical workloads to the cloud first and then leverage integration, network and cloud infrastructure partners. This all should be undergone to ensure a seamless, secure and smooth transition. Direct connectivity should always be used to maintain security, performance and control.
Emphasis on the Patients
The patients are certainly the consumer of health services. The health industry has to rely on patients to run its business and the patient’s utility scores dictate compensation level of the practitioners. Additionally, they are single but most influencing determinant in the care outcomes. The stages of Meaningful Use require health providing entities to involve patients online, empower them with personalized information and encourage them to participate more and take responsibility of their health. In 2015, providers will need to invest and deliver refined, engaging online and mobile tools that enable and empower the health service consumers.
Efficient Recourse Utilization
If the healthcare expenditures are estimated with respect to the current growth rates, they will become out of control by 2020, and everyone will be squeezed. Every single unit of healthcare IT like payers, device manufacturers and providers all currently have business directives to efficiently allocate the resources and do more with less. On parallel IT organizations are looking to technologies like SIP, Cloud, Ethernet, mobile technologies to control core competencies of partners and in turn make revenues.
Data Center Association
As organizations are to centralize the applications to ensure a better performance, to exercise control and to improve flexibility. They are also to do more with less. Now a major trend is seen towards data center association whether it is done through third parties or by moving to the Cloud. The providers are being more innovative in deploying dedicated network connectivity from its core to other locations in order to extend their network reach and respond to application growth trends.
For the next few years, health IT will keep varying its trends, the care providers will continue to progress tremendously towards more effective, informed and personalized care. The above five trends may also portray challenges and opportunities for providers.