One month into the new year, the healthcare community continues to fight another coronavirus surge. The ongoing pandemic has demanded increased innovation and called on healthcare IT leaders to digitally transform operations to improve patient care, lower costs, and improve the clinical, staff, and employee experience. What will we see in healthcare IT investments and business strategy in the coming year?
Closing the integration gap
Merger and acquisition activity in healthcare has reached a record high, with 2021 deal volume rising an extraordinary 56 percent from 2020. This has likely left many health systems with disconnected legacy systems or different instances of the same systems. As healthcare organizations look to consolidate systems to a single cloud enterprise solution, more are seeing the value in tightly coupling their ERP and EHR solutions. Oracle’s purchase of Cerner and agreements between Workday and Epic around training content are recent examples of industry leading software vendors capitalizing on this trend.
Organizations that have already invested in ERP and EHR solutions will be looking to increase ROI and end user adoption, in addition to increasing supply chain maturity, limiting revenue leakage, and improving reporting through the integration of these solutions. Organizations that are just starting that journey or are just now moving to their future ERP solution, will look to invest in EHR-ERP integrations as part of their implementation process. Increased clinical integration in healthcare supply chains can help build more resilience as supply chain disruptions continue. Further, increasing interoperability is on the agenda of many C-suite leaders as healthcare becomes more interconnected. With new regulations on data and information sharing continuously rolling out, we predict health IT leaders will spend time building their interoperability strategies to facilitate compliance and reporting and help improve efficiency in the upcoming year.
Bring your A game – AI, analytics, and automation
Healthcare technology has made significant improvements in recent years and organizations are ready to leverage technologies including AI, analytics, and machine learning. Eighty-five percent of healthcare leaders already have an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, with many others in the process of creating their plan. There is growing belief among healthcare leaders that artificial intelligence will help improve patient outcomes, support cost savings, and increase healthcare availability across wider economic demographics.
Analytics have been proven as a powerful force in achieving the mission of healthcare organizations. As healthcare leaders look to increase spending to raise the quality of patient care with improved outcomes, lower costs for both the patient and provider, improve patient satisfaction, and improve the care provider experience, data visualization tools will continue to be a high priority investment. Advanced analytics platforms allow health systems to view real-time information from all sides of the business and empower leaders to improve decision-making related to these challenge areas.
Many healthcare organizations will look to implement their AI, analytics, and automation strategies by building upon a firm foundation of modern EHR and cloud ERP solutions. Top vendors in both spaces are investing heavily in AI to supplement their pervasive employee and manager self-service automation. By automating low-value tasks and incorporating AI into workflows for area such as finance, supply chain, and HR, employees can shift their time and focus to more meaningful work. Equally important to automating work in the back office, we predict a growing push for automation on the clinician side as well. Staff shortages and clinician burnout have increased the need for digital assistants and apps which can help guide patients through the earliest stages of the care process and post-care follow up.
Top EHR and ERP vendors have invested heavily in recent years to enhance their application specific data warehouse / reporting solutions. Other data centric vendors and various startups have also invested heavily in technology to bring disparate healthcare data sources together. The push in the upcoming year will be to build enterprise level reporting solutions that consolidates data from each of these solutions for enterprise level decision making. This is the year where the many healthcare data vendors begin their “future perfect chaos” journey which will lead to a thinning of the market into winners and losers. Healthcare executives must choose their partners wisely as many current vendors will be part of other organizations or will not exist in the future.
Focus on culture and recovery from the Great Resignation
Much has been written about the great resignation and record numbers of people leaving their jobs. Nearly 1 in 5 healthcare workers have resigned since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The large workforce gap has created an even larger burden on remaining employees, further compounding understaffing and clinician burnout. We anticipate healthcare organizations will prioritize investing in retention efforts and supporting stronger company culture and employee wellness initiatives to retain current employees and attract top talent.
The pandemic has brought new expectations in transparency from employers across all industries. In addition to frequent, transparent communication from the top-down, organizations must look to open two-way communication lines for honest feedback from employees – and act based on input.
We predict a rise in healthcare organizations looking to revamp and rework their cultures and improve communications by putting organizational change management plans in place, especially hospitals undergoing mergers and acquisitions or large technology changes. We will see more formal communication plans designed to help employees feel more informed and engaged. This will also provide more opportunities to provide more frequent or anonymous feedback for increasing personal wellness, more relevant training, and professional growth opportunities to address burnout.
What trends do you think will continue in 2022 and give your health system the competitive edge? With one of the most innovative years in healthcare behind us, we anticipate the momentum to continue to build this coming year.