The Four Digitalization Trends Shaping Asia’s Healthcare Industry in 2022

The most visible transformation of healthcare across the world during and post-COVID-19 is the continued transformation and adoption of digital health tools. They are visible through telehealth, personal devices providing real-time access care, social determinants of health databases, and cloud-based data storage solutions.

With doctors, surgeons, and medical professionals adopting mobile devices and innovative technology to access information like medical records, patient history, research data, and drug therapies, they are better equipped to diagnose and treat patients.

These new tools play a crucial role in preventing complications, avoiding unnecessary surgeries, improving quality of life, and sustaining overall health. They also help improve the quality and efficiency of care, develop new therapeutic approaches, treatment options, drugs, and even predict the onset of epidemics.

These advances can improve patient adherence making treatment much more effective. These include supportive, educational, information, organizational, rehabilitative, therapeutic, preventive, and diagnostic solutions that improve patient access. Advanced solutions like robotic prosthetic limbs, remote heart failure monitoring, and diagnostic devices all contribute to better patient outcomes and improved public health.

In the past, patient support delivered by healthcare providers was often complex and sluggish. Patients were frustrated by long wait times and high costs. They wanted more convenience, more emphasis on wellness, preventative services, and more control over their healthcare.

Then came COVID-19. Because of the movement restrictions during the pandemic in most markets, patients, caregivers, and providers have turned to digital solutions to remain connected, access care, and support treatment regimens.

Almost instantaneously, patient support programs (PSPs) have become increasingly important now. The ability to wrap services around leading-edge therapies, deliver superior patient outcomes, drive differentiation, and strengthen patient and healthcare professional relationships holds the key to a hospital or medical facility’s success.

Today, digital PSPs have evolved into holistic platforms and cloud-based approaches. It is not merely a mobile or a website patient interface but also cloud-based platforms that integrate and allow a seamless flow of information across many stakeholders. They can successfully drive awareness through patient education and support, better manage adverse events through online guidance on drug administration, achieve better medication adherence through education and reminder services or provide condition management support through integrated services.

The benefits of a well-planned digital PSP include to:

• Improve patient engagement and medication adherence and overall patient care
• Change the patient-doctor relationship by increasing dialogue and communication
• Empower and make the patient an active participant
• Provide a stepping-stone to scalable and personalized medicine
• Reassure HCPs that the treatment is a viable option for the patient and that it is adequately supported
• Positively measure impact on patient outcomes

The sense of urgency for the healthcare industry has stepped up a few notches over the last year and more. According to the Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2021 report, 81 percent of healthcare executives say the pace of digital transformation for their organization has accelerated, while 93 percent said that they are innovating with a sense of urgency and call to action this year.

Among the tools making headway include telemedicine, artificial intelligence-enabled medical devices, and blockchain electronic health records. Innovation is helping to streamline physicians’ work, optimize systems, improve patient outcomes, reduce human error, and lower costs.

The industry’s workforce needs to be trained on the technical and digital skills for them to optimize their work, fix their pain points, and innovate. Using DKSH as an example, when many of our teams could not see healthcare professionals at the clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies during the lockdown period, our digital capacity and ability to go virtual became a powerful tool for us to continue serving our clients and customers. We were able to better position our digital platforms, including a more holistic utilization of our customer relationship management tool.

Today’s digitized healthcare system is seeing an increase in data entering the system. Being able to manage this data and integrate it has become the key to an organization’s success. Cloud and hybrid-cloud solutions can help organizations navigate these challenges while also meeting specific clinical, administrative, and budgetary needs.

There are many parts of the current healthcare journey that are either fragmented or untouched by digitalization. However, digitalization and changes in the legislation in the industry have provided some of the following transformations:

• Reduced the rate of medication errors through patient record analysis since it can flag any inconsistencies between a patient’s health and drug prescriptions, while alerting health professionals and patients when there is a potential risk
• Facilitated preventive care as data analysis can identify recurring patients and create preventive plans to keep them from returning
• More accurate staffing predictive analysis can help hospitals and clinics estimate future admission rates, which helps these facilities allocate the proper staff to deal with patients. This saves money and reduces emergency room wait times when a facility is understaffed

Today, we are sitting on a mountain of data that, with the right analytics, can enable good decision-making regarding the reach and penetration of products. Our analytics platform can accelerate the process and provide vital information and services to our clients.