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The advent of Industry 4.0 brought with it an exponential growth in the Healthcare and Life Sciences sectors. Even though the Covid-19 pandemic may have hit the brakes on worldwide economic growth, the importance of the right kind of investment in healthcare is more evident than ever. Here, we attempt to examine what organizations in this space can do to bring long-term impact, bolster growth and trim superfluous costs (an estimated 15% saving of global workforce costs alone which would amount to trillions of dollars).
With health information doubling every 3-4 years, it is becoming increasingly impossible for humans to keep up with the sheer volume of data. The right ‘Digital evolution and Data’ strategy can help facilitate interconnectivity between healthcare providers, pharmaceutical industries, life sciences firms, insurance providers & payers, and patients & consumers.
From a financial perspective, investors are scrutinizing pharma and med.-tech. companies, as well as payers and healthcare providers to urge them to make more digitally oriented investments to optimize effort and costs.
Organizations, therefore, are increasingly turning to solutions that leverage Robotic Process Automation and other cognitive solutions to lower costs and risks, increase flexibility, improve productivity, quality, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
In order to ensure they do all the right things to achieve those objectives, organizations must evaluate the following sets of information:
The Need: Those operating in advanced market ecosystems have realized they need to pare health care costs and improve efficiency. Also, there has been an enormous growth in available healthcare data owing to electronic medical records and wearable devices. In addition to these, technological advances in both software & hardware have made utilizing data to draw insights increasingly possible.
The Solution: Before attempting to provide a solution, an organization must ensure that it would continue to be able to pass regulatory scrutiny. This would entail making all existing data available immediately for regulators, and manipulating application software in a non-invasive manner. There must be extensive automated testing, documentation and validation in order to build a truly effective, scalable and modular solution.
The right automation solution not only ensures compliance, but enhances control and enables a much greater transformation capacity. Cognitive workers can help substitute back-office tasks to make room for employees to focus their energies on directly productive tasks, greatly improving efficiency.
Even though most agree that automation is necessary and inevitable, there has still been some resistance to automate tasks related to validation in these highly regulated sectors. However, it is slowly being accepted that automation in validation can be as much, if not more, reliable and accurate than humans can be.
Intelligent assistants and Chatbot based solutions can help provide hyper-realistic primary counselling using natural language processing, voice and facial recognition etc. As diagnoses go remote, Computer Vision is an effective way to increase accuracy through highly trained AI algorithms that even can detect conditions otherwise missed out by human doctors. Computer Vision has also opened the gateway into a world of quick and enhanced monitoring, detection of illness and medical reporting, which in turn can help address the pressing need to minimize costs.
Population health management, Machine Learning and Analytics too have been on the frontlines of the mounting global defence against COVID-19, from identifying clusters of high-risk patients, and tracking hospital capacities, to preparing for a future where this might not be a one-off global event, or even the worst one yet. These tools and the insights drawn from them will most certainly play a role in analysing and arriving at the best possible responses to the spread of diseases worldwide.
Advanced RPA solutions coupled with Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are set to revolutionize processes, streamline costs and magnify benefits by creating more time for innovation. The collaboration between humans and Intelligent Automation will elevate innovation and create innumerable opportunities for scientific breakthroughs. Better, agile processes certainly mean better outcomes – bridging the gaps between healthcare, pharma, life sciences, insurance and payers.
The Challenges: Change leaders must realize that most of these will not be quick wins and they must be in for the long haul. There may be significant initial costs but with the very survival of the industry at stake, the onset of digitalization becomes imperative. Additionally, employers may need to address resistance owing to the workforce’s fear of AI.
The Vision: With the right thought leadership, a reliable & experienced technology partner, and a people focused, HR led transformation; organizations can establish the right vision and formulate a strategy to reap the benefits of the growth this sector is certain to achieve.
With dedicated Centres of Excellence working across the areas of Data & Insights, Intelligent Automation, AI/Ml, Blockchain, Extended Reality, Product Development, and Wearables; we at ValueLabs have partnered with several leading organizations around the globe and established competencies across the Healthcare domain for the last 20 years.
We are now, more than ever, equipped to aid our partners on their Digital Transformation journeys, as the world adjusts to the new normal of remote-work. We leverage these in-house capabilities and build solutions customized to help our clients increase – revenue, operational efficiency and agility – and innovate to gain a competitive edge.