Siloed, fragmented, and inefficient – these are some of the terms used to describe today’s global healthcare industry, which is struggling to keep pace with digital disruption. Legacy systems cause a steep administrative burden; yet these systems contain precious data that, when digitalized, can sharpen the edge of healthcare, enabling cutting-edge services, timely care, and enhanced patient experience.

The key lies in enabling secure data management and digital transformation. Today, healthcare is witnessing numerous acquisitions, consolidations, and partnerships allowing organizations to extend capabilities and reduce costs. Even as agile, digital-native players enter this market, incumbents are scrambling to revamp their IT systems, operations, and business models in order to remain competitive.

Drivers of Change within Healthcare

Almost every healthcare enterprise has siloes within their existing systems, making it challenging to exchange data with payers, providers, and governmental organizations. This is a significant barrier to streamlined and timely patient care. Healthcare enterprises need to connect and coordinate with all players within the healthcare ecosystem via interoperable systems, secure data management, and advanced analytics.

Another key trend is that healthcare is seeing many mergers and acquisitions that lead to disparate digital and payment experiences for members due to different platforms and technologies being used. Enterprises need a way to unify member interaction across omnichannel touchpoints in order to improve stakeholder satisfaction.

Further, with increasing incidents of healthcare fraud and the need to predict treatment needs, payer analytics is emerging as a space for value creation. In the US, it was estimated at US $3.9 billion in 2022 and expected to grow to US $4.8 billion in 2023. Healthcare companies are eager to digitize their landscape with electronic health records (EHRs) and digital health technologies so as to securely expand their business, improve services, and reduce administration costs.

Three Pillars of Infosys Healthcare – Connect, Unify, Digitize

Infosys is positioning its platforms and offerings to help healthcare companies achieve harmony in healthcare. The three pillars of its value proposition are:

·       The power of connectivity – Rich, secure, and accessible connections between systems, data points, and stakeholders across complex healthcare value chains will drive better experiences, outcomes, and value. Infosys believes that by ‘connecting everything’, enterprises can achieve technological innovation, consistency, and collaboration. Further, it can assist different enterprises in better understanding patients and their journeys, thereby directly impacting care quality.

Benefits of connection: Establishing connection delivers tangible rewards such as shorter service and product lifecycles, augmented member and patient insights, enhanced collaboration, and faster innovation.

·       The criticality of interoperability – Streamlining complex, legacy, and fragmented healthcare technology systems and processes will deliver operational gains, process efficiency, and employee productivity. Infosys believes in an approach that will standardize, integrate, and optimize IT systems and operating methods to enable total interoperability and data access for all key stakeholders, providing value across the whole healthcare journey.

Benefits of unification: Unifying the ecosystem generates significant cost savings across IT spend and operational overheads. Moreover, it improves data security, access, insights, decision-making, resource utilization, and reusability. It helps healthcare enterprises scale their IT systems and applications and accelerate time to value.

·       The transformational nature of digitization – Healthcare companies want to leverage digital to deliver cohesive, future-ready, and wholesome healthcare journeys. Infosys intelligently combines skills and IP to help clients across the healthcare ecosystem navigate their end-to-end digital journeys with confidence. We use unique engagement, operating, and implementation models to create digital change at speed, with more control and less risk. In effect, Infosys synthesizes systems, data, and people to provide holistic healthcare journeys and business resilience.

Benefits of digitization: Digitization helps healthcare companies remain compliant, access new opportunities, gain market advantage and visibility in new healthcare ecosystems, and innovate at pace. From a spend perspective, it cuts the cost of service, treatment, and operations. Finally, it generates actionable insights that improve operational efficiency and enhance patient and member experiences.

When evaluating prospective technology transformation partners, healthcare companies should consider those that can securely connect, unify, and digitize systems and processes at speed while minimizing risk across the organization.