Seizing the Moment in Health IT

By Jim Jordan, President and CEO, PLSG

The life sciences industry presents an unending resource of fascinating ideas generated by brilliant minds, all in the pursuit of improving the health of people. One critical area – and one that may not, at first glance, appear as exciting as a new cure for disease or a new method of treatment – comes in the form of healthcare IT (HIT).

Think about it. If a new idea can’t be scaled, produced, or tracked, then it can’t be successfully commercialized. That’s the key role of HIT and one that many leaders in this space, myself included, believe represents an attractive growth opportunity in life sciences.

Healthdatamanagement.com recently posted its “Top 10 Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2018,” an interesting and illuminating survey, further proving the potential for growth in this discipline. Here is a summary of that list:

1. Creating platforms to better assess the impact of existing and emerging drugs and treatments and to help identify patients who could benefit most from those offerings.
2. Greater digital mobile engagement will create more and stronger information pathways among life sciences organizations, medical providers, and patients. Mobile device usage among these groups is estimated to increase by 50% by 2019.
3. Using the Internet of Things (IoT) for asset tracking and inventory management in hospitals will double by 2020, improving patient safety, staff satisfaction, and operational efficiency while lowering overall costs.
4. Patient-reported data is on the rise as patients become more like true partners in their own care. Technology enables greater ability for patients to measure, collect, and share relevant data with their providers.
5. Hospitals are continuing to expand the use of robotics beyond supply chain tasks and into actual clinical settings to better automate existing processes and re-engineer established systems and practices.
6. Healthcare organizations have increasingly moved beyond pilot projects and are using more blockchain for operations management and patient identity.
7. Estimates call for 20% of healthcare organizations and 40% of life sciences companies to achieve up to a 20% gain in productivity through adoption of cognitive/AI technology.
8. Commercial back-office operations, to adequately deal with tremendous and ever-expanding data management requirements, will increasingly shift this workload to business process as a service (BPaaS) vendors.
9. Digital medical devices will require heightened cybersecurity protection, to avoid the possibility of causing multi-million dollar class-action lawsuits caused by cyberattack.
10. A new generation of digital healthcare services is reaching consumers in a faster and more personalized way, relying on tele-health and patient management technologies.

Healthcare IT provides the common element of each of these items. The PLSG promises to devote the resources of time and talent to remain at the forefront of HIT development across our region.

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