The Covid-19 pandemic has not been a smooth ride, especially for the healthcare sector. We are witnessing how healthcare professionals and frontline workers are striving to reduce the spread of this deadly pandemic and how they are efficiently using technology for this. Last year, the pandemic has been driving organizational changes resulting in various innovations and rapid technology adoption in the Healthcare and Health IT sector.

The Health IT leaders were prompted to reimagine and redefine their strategies, which were useful in a pre-Covid phase. The pandemic-induced transformation demanded quick results with limited resources and mostly under stressful conditions. Cerner Corporation is a Health IT solutions provider. While speaking to Cerner, Linda Reed, Vice President, IT and CIO at St. Joseph's Health, Paterson, New Jersey, says, "COVID-19 forced everyone to do more with limited time and resources. It's underscored the importance of working smarter, and we'll continue pursuing opportunities to enhance efficiency while providing world-class care as we move into the future."

Remote and Digital, the New Norm

We all witnessed how the pandemic-driven restrictions impacted the economy. Public, private, and almost all services went online. Healthcare also had to become a part of this journey. Since last year, telehealth and e-pharmacy have become the go-to solutions in case of health issues and consultation. Many healthtech startups sprung up and health IT providers were keenly working on improving virtual care.

The pandemic-induced change was quick and many industries did not get enough time to think about migrating to digital platforms. This could be considered a lesson to learn from the scenario. Health IT departments can now specifically focus on the data available regarding telehealth services, how it is benefitting people, who are at a maximum and minimum advantage, etc. Although virtual healthcare services were embraced, a larger population was negatively impacted due to the lack of access, lack of digital literacy, the high expense met in the digital health services, and many other reasons. From this year, it could get more advanced and accessible to all without any divide. Going digital and remote was not just limited to patient care, but also other operations including IT and development, inpatient services, help desks, and every business function. To ensure this there arose a necessity to technically enable the staff and train them for the digital era.

Refocusing on Cybersecurity

During the rapid digital transformation last year, many companies fell victim to several data breaches and cyberattacks. This was the result of heightened vulnerabilities exposed by the weakly secured digital systems. It is not very far when health institutions will also fall prey to such cyberattacks. Health systems are going virtual and the widespread deployment of virtual desktop interfaces and connectivity can become the reason for such attacks. These large vulnerabilities will be targeted and taken advantage of. Thus, Health IT systems should refocus on cybersecurity and building an advanced and technologically strong security infrastructure for the health centers. Apart from endpoint security, the large virtual workforce interface should also be secured from potential cyberattacks. Multiple authentications are necessary to understand who is accessing the system and getting hold of sensitive data.

Enhanced Collaboration

The new way of providing healthcare services and understanding the patients and the scenario demands the efficient use of data and analytics. Analytical insights enable health IT analysts to understand the diaspora and provide services according to rising needs.

Data is the soul of businesses and gathering a huge pool of usable data necessarily needs collaboration. IT systems should encourage maximum collaboration with other services providers, vendors, patients, healthtech companies, and other important stakeholders.

Collaboration with Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) is imperative. When healthcare institutions digitally transformed, the staff population and frontline workers contributed exponentially to this. Hence, the IT systems should gather and preserve data on the staff, workers, and other internal communities. The vaccination drive for frontline workers demands clear data of who received vaccination and when. The silos between the payroll system, vaccination data, should hang together with all other employee status data. The human resource and IT operations systems in healthcare centers should break silos and collaborate for better management in the coming years.

Patient-Centered Care

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the idea of a patient-centric system where healthcare providers started working towards making care accessible to all people and patients out there. The digital shift and virtual care system enabled this and now we have IT devices and products that put patients at the focus and work for their betterment and needs. All the telehealth and virtual health education services were initiated to give patients the needed attention during a crisis and answer their heath and pandemic-related queries. The heath IT sections scaled and revamped their products to suit the demands of their patients. A simple, accessible, and efficient care system for people will be the norm for the coming years.

Stepping Out of the Comfort Zone

All the changes mentioned above are either already in place or anticipated to come into force soon. They are all digital solutions that leverage cutting-edge technologies like AI, machine learning, computer vision, deep learning, and more. Most of the healthcare systems across the world were not very familiar with these technologies. However, they had to adopt and adapt according to the changing regulations put forth by the crisis, which is an infectious, easily spreading virus. Hospitals had to step out of their comfort zone to use the innovations and in some cases engage in innovations according to the specific needs. Patients inside the hospital demanded special care since they were the most vulnerable to the infection. The health IT systems had to repurpose technologies according to changing needs and this was in no way a simple task. Therefore, the system should innovate itself in a way that it can exploit these technologies and virtual healthcare devices to their advantage rather than getting trapped inside the technology.