OREANDA-NEWS. August 18, 2015. “The foundation for successful digital transformation in healthcare often lies in optimizing the overall IT system,” says Stefan Metzger.

“This means simplifying the underlying IT infrastructure and integrating analytics solutions on top that can pool information from now disconnected systems.

This would allow for greatly improved communications between patients and medical staff, including, for example, better patient queuing systems or inter-hospital patient filing systems, both important components in improving the quality of care. However, the reform should be more than simply improving queues and patient filing systems.

Innovative technology is only as good as the usefulness of the data it creates, which, in the case of healthcare, can be measured in terms of the ability to inform patient care systems.

Patients generate vast volumes of data with their mobile devices, smartphones, apps and web searches that tell a big and important story. At Cognizant, we call these personal collections of data “Patient Halos”.

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) along with greater standardization of communication protocols have created new platforms on which healthcare devices and sensors are able to communicate with each other and with other machines, objects, environments and infrastructures.

Technology such as wearables, coupled with game-like features (also known as gamification) that aim to increase motivation, can help patients initiate and sustain positive behavioral changes from treatment to rehabilitation and beyond.

This presents a momentous opportunity to utilize new technologies such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud (SMAC) and sensors to improve patient care.

However, to reach a truly connected healthcare of tomorrow, healthcare providers also need to make sure the right infrastructure is in place to support analytics solutions that ultimately play their part in improving healthcare.”