The digitalization of the clinical environment might seem like an easy task – a success ready to happen. In reality, however, it is an unenviable and exhausting endeavor. Leveraging large amounts of data bytes collected during routine care is excruciatingly challenging.
Yet, despite the enormous financial support and countless hours invested, society has failed to deliver a meaningful clinical environment in digital form. The challenges that arise before modern healthcare are ubiquitous and universally present.
Challenges of the Contemporary Healthcare
On a global scale, healthcare trends are demanding cost reduction across all segments of services. This is not easily achievable, especially when increasingly strict and stringent regulations tend to affect payers, service providers, and regulators equally. Additionally, major healthcare systems are struggling to implement information transparency, which is ever more needed in public hospitals and private practices.
Another important aspect of contemporary healthcare systems is the excessive burnout rate among healthcare workers due to the meaningless use of technology. Clinicians are overwhelmed with excessive administrative work, which leads to more computer screen hours, exhaustion, and burnout.
Due to the everyday burden of routine work, there is a lack of physician-scientists, the necessary driving force in biomedical research. Current systems and computerized approaches do not allow the systematic collection of data and information created during routine procedures, such as prevention, diagnostics, treatment, and rehabilitation.
Most clinical information systems are proprietary, closed, monolithic, and severely disadvantaged by the heavy burden of the past. They are rigid, and any changes to the underlying data structure are unacceptably expensive with a long development lifecycle.
Without innovative force and immediate change, we risk entering a vicious cycle of the excessive workload with a low clinical value, which ultimately affects patient care.
The development of a universally accessible, knowledge-based healthcare depends on its inbound capability to share data across the clinical ecosystem. In that process, data must be transformed into corresponding information, which must be delivered to the right person at the right time and in the proper format.
A Solution in the Form of Clinical Information Technology
In our experience, the changes must start at the bedside. A medical system’s capacity to make breakthroughs is directly proportional to the flexibility of the technological framework to accommodate both the physician’s and patient’s needs.
The most valuable asset healthcare workers have is their time, which is best spent on patient care.
The meaningful and intelligent use of technological solutions saves both time and finances, allowing healthcare workers to concentrate on what they do best – provide exceptional healthcare service.
For example, precision and personalized medicine are delivered exclusively through the interaction of patients with their healthcare providers while at the same time seamlessly supported by affordable technology. In fact, an increasing number of novel therapeutic approaches rely on the seamless interaction between the patient and physician through a specific digital tool.
We at Wemedoo believe in a single solution in the form of software that enables modern healthcare delivery approaches, while its utilization creates additional value for all stakeholders. Advancement of healthcare by proper utilization of cutting-edge technology will directly help patients, support caregivers, encourage healthcare workers, and inspire society.
Digital Ecosystem in Healthcare
The solution to modern healthcare challenges could be found in an integrated framework in which all actors can connect and interact in a biomedical enterprise seamlessly.
Such a framework could facilitate the development of biomedical digital assets that will empower knowledge-based clinical science, research, and clinical practice. We believe in the approach for structuring this framework in the form of a digital ecosystem that will:
- Facilitate compelling and efficient clinical communication
- Design user-oriented clinical documentation
- Eliminate low-level manual edits, such as “copy-paste” actions
- Transform data to reusable information
- Automate medical coding through the automated transformation of data
- Eliminate the border between the primary and secondary source of clinical data and information
- Deliver quality-oriented care
- Modernize clinical research infrastructure
- Improve accessibility of clinical research
- Extend access to clinical trials
What the Future Holds
We are embarking on an era that has a digital stamp all over it. In every moment, a huge amount of data is circling around us, facilitating every personal or business venture. However exhausting it might seem, the digitalization of healthcare is inevitable. We at Wemedoo see this process as an undisrupted flow of information. Structuring it in a usable form and utilizing it to the point that it doesn’t burden, but in fact enhances clinical work is the best way to go.