Healthcare industry is under heavy pressure to provide better care at lower cost. Our aging population demands more care services than ever before, and the related costs are becoming unmanageable for societies and private citizens.
Healthcare has the fastest growing datasphere in all the industries. The amount of medical data doubles every two years, but also the number of data sources keep increasing at a rapid pace. As data is fragmented to several IT systems, fully utilizing the data to serve is challenging. The situation places an ever-growing pressure on care delivery and cost efficiency and a cognitive burden on the care professionals. This calls for new solutions for data management and advanced analytics in healthcare.
For all previous generations, the lack of data was one of the major hindrances in patient care. There were only few methods and equipment that would produce hard data for diagnostic, follow-up, and communication purposes. With rapid development of medicine, medical devices, and IT systems, the problem is now quite the opposite.
“The amount of clinical data has exploded, but that is just one of the major challenges of data management in healthcare. Problems arise from the complexity of the data sphere. There are more sources of data, the data is more heterogenous and complex, and there are more stakeholders creating and consuming the data,” describes Joona Pylkäs, Head of Data and AI at TietoEVRY Health & Care.
Data management in healthcare faces challenges on many levels:
Access: Data is fragmented to siloed systems and end-users must use different proprietary applications to access it.
Liquidity: Data doesn’t flow freely between systems, operations, and organizations.
Processing: Data is primarily processed by humans, resulting in heavy cognitive burden, and increasing risk of error.
Future of health is built on data, AI, and Cloud
The aging population and the need for precision medicine and personalized care are pushing the healthcare sector towards value-based care and higher productivity. If we solve the data problem, healthcare organizations can efficiently process and use data to make work easier for healthcare professionals, to increase the quality of care, and to decrease the cost. All this while providing better experience and more impactful care for the patients.
“Data platforms, AI, and Cloud technologies are the game changers. They can transform health data repositories from a burden to valuable assets serving the needs of patients, healthcare service providers, and medical research,” Pylkäs says.
Hyperscale cloud platforms, like Microsoft Azure, offer the most powerful data management and processing solutions that enable more intelligent utilization of data but also much faster application development and delivery. Due to massive investments and benefits of scale the leading cloud platforms are further developing at an astonishing pace.
“We at TietoEVRY have developed a comprehensive and highly advanced solution portfolio of data-driven solutions and services. Our Data Platform for Health pulls fragmented data into one industry-specific data platform that enables healthcare organizations to transform their business with data-driven applications and AI solutions, while being compliant with the security and privacy requirements of the industry,” says Pylkäs.
To hear more about the future of healthcare and data, come hear Joona Pylkäs’ keynote speech in Tampere Smart City Week on 14th June, at 9:15 AM.