Why is Digital Transformation Needed for the Healthcare Industry?

Post pandemic, there has been a massive surge in the usage of digital technologies across healthcare sectors. Healthcare experts’ are now increasingly prioritizing digital transformation of healthcare so as to create robust and successful healthcare practices. Given below are the four trends accelerating this progress:

Increase in Chronic Diseases

Chronic diseases are increasingly putting pressure on healthcare systems across the world. The world today has over 500 million people suffering from respiratory diseases, while another 400 million suffer from diabetes, and another 1.1 billion have hypertension. And these numbers are only going to keep going up, as per estimations.

As such, to maintain the sustainability of healthcare systems, there’s a crucial need to adopt digital transformation for healthcare industry. This way they can detect and treat diseases faster and efficiently. Or, even better yet, they could help prevent people from falling victim to chronic diseases in the first place.

Staff Shortage in Healthcare

As more demand for healthcare rises, healthcare providers face staff shortages across the world. The WHO estimates that a worldwide deficit of 12.9 million skilled healthcare professionals will hit us by 2035.

A survey from 2021 also found that 42 percent of healthcare providers reported feeling burnout, with the Covid-19 pandemic only adding to the problem. As such, coming up with a way to regulate and protect the physical and mental wellbeing of healthcare providers has become increasingly crucial. Adopting digital transformation for healthcare can greatly help simplify workflows and automate routine tasks.

Patients Demand Personalized Care

With technology and the world at our fingertips now more than ever, patients’ expectations have seen a huge surge in the healthcare industry. Patients now expect more convenient and personalized healthcare experiences.

The pandemic also further led to a massive shift in patient expectations. For example, a survey found that around 40 percent of consumers voted that they would continue using telehealth in the future, compared to the statistics of 11 percent of patients using telehealth before the pandemic.

Healthcare Providers Seek More Efficiency to Reduce Costs

A major challenge for the healthcare industry is that the expenses of maintaining infrastructure and health systems keep increasing while reimbursement is under pressure.

The expenditure on healthcare worldwide is estimated to increase at a 3.9 percent rate per year between 2020 to 2024, as compared to the 2.8 percent record of 2015 to 2019. But more money expenditure does not necessarily mean better results in the healthcare industry. A lot of healthcare expenditure could go wasted. Reducing such waste and improving operational efficiencies has become a massive focus for the healthcare industry. And to achieve this, digital transformation for healthcare is going to have to play a major role with its data-driven insights.

All these four reasons together indicate the urgent need for digital transformation for healthcare industry. This way, healthcare providers can embrace innovative ways of fulfilling supply and demand. It’s not an understatement to say that the future of the healthcare industry depends on digital transformation.