By Bill Anderson

Mounting tension in the healthcare industry, through strained budgets and rising cost pressures, means many players inside and outside the sector are looking for ways to streamline and modernize their processes with the latest technology.

Financial pressures and an aging population are putting pressure on both patients and healthcare providers to combat rising healthcare costs. The average American spends nearly $4,000 on healthcare each year, and this number is expected to balloon to more than $5,000 in 2023, according to Evercore ISI and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

Healthcare now accounts for 20% of the U.S. economy. In this climate, the need for technology to improve efficiency and customer service whilst reducing costs is greater than ever before.

Amazon is the latest tech giant to enter the healthcare space, further suggesting that technology-enabled healthcare will dominate in 2018. Apple recently announced a trial enabling U.S. customers to automatically download and view their medical records using their iPhones.

Medical technology is a broad field with innovations in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, information technology, medical devices and equipment, which have made significant contributions to improving the health of patients. According to a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global digital health market has been predicted to rake in a revenue of $536.6 billion by the end of 2025 from $196.3 billion in 2017 at a 13.4% CAGR.

The focus of many healthcare providers is now turning to how they can boost operational efficiencies to streamline health services to patients and increase accuracy of diagnoses. The challenge a lot of healthcare providers find themselves battling against is capital trapped in existing IT infrastructure, which stumps investment in cost-effective, robust platforms to improve the quality of healthcare delivery.

The day-to-day running of a healthcare business requires smooth communication flow. However, hospital IT leaders are having to deal with managing a growing collection of legacy data systems, such as appointment scheduling, healthcare operations management and patient billing.

For example, patient scheduling requires manual input, and staff often work varied hours and need to adapt on an ad hoc basis to adhere to urgent requests. As clinics grow larger, they need a scalable and transparent solution that works well with other systems.

Working from distributed computing systems over robust networks can enable health professionals to better deliver to patients. With old enterprise systems there is the risk of not having these applications supported by the original vendor. In addition to this, the constant maintenance and management of a legacy system is time-intensive and drains costs.

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