Download our cheat sheets to brush up on new and emerging technologies in today's digital world.
Cheat Sheet
Health Care IT Cheat Sheets: Digital Health Systems
Our cheat sheets will get you up to speed on several new technologies and initiatives for providers undergoing digital transformation.
Updated -
June 26, 2018
Agile Health Care Organizations |Artificial Intelligence | Augmented Reality | Business Intelligence and Analytics | Big Data | Blockchain | Chief Digital Innovation Officer | Cloud Computing | Cybersecurity | Digital Front Door | Digital Health Systems | EMR Optimization | Interoperability | Internet of Things | Natural Language Processing | Patient-Generated Health Data | Social Determinants of Health Data | Systemness in Health Care | Virtual Reality | 3D Printing
Agile Health Care Organizations
The Agile methodology focuses on the rapid delivery of a product in working increments and is increasingly becoming the standard when it comes to IT-enabled initiatives. However agile health care organizations need to have both a stable backbone and dynamic capabilities to change. Stability enables efficiency, reliability, and scalability, while agility enables responsiveness and adaptation.
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances across several industries and task types have focused new attention on the field of AI. Relative to human decision making, AI systems can provide advantages in speed, capacity, quality, and consistency. Several areas of opportunity for AI exist in health care.
Augmented Reality
Our digital and physical realities have started to merge as technological innovations continue to proliferate, blurring the lines between computers, humans, and the environment. Augmented reality allows digital information to naturally enter our physical reality as an active part of our environment.
Business Intelligence and Analytics
Many questions remain regarding the details of health care reform today. There is broad recognition that BI and analytics are necessary for helping health care organizations adjust to the exponential rise in the availability of data, along with new financial and quality imperatives driven by value-based payment models.
Big Data
The health care industry has seen the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), the rise of consumer mobile devices, and increasing use of clinical biometric sensors are generating floods of new data. New "big data" technologies manage and drive value from this new flood of data.
Blockchain
Blockchain is a digital ledger that enables parties with no history of trusting one another to secure commit to contracts and record transactions, without the need for an intermediary such as a bank. The technology has the potential to provide value to health care.
Chief Digital Innovation Officer
Innovation must be championed by the CEO and supported by the C-suite more broadly. The role of the Chief Digital Innovation Officer (CDIO) has emerged to help organizations carefully tend their innovation efforts. The CDIO and CIO will need to work as close partners so that IT operations enable digital innovations.
Cloud Computing
Cloud technology offers hospitals and health systems several potential benefits, such as lowering capital costs, enabling flexible, on-demand addition of computing resources, boosting scalability, and improving reliability (e.g., data backup and recovery).
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is now a board and C-suite level issue in light of the many significant recent cyber events across industries. Cyber resiliency extends beyond technical controls and is built holistically through effective governance, policy, process, and education as well as technology and services.
Digital Front Door
Patients increasingly demand frictionless, digital interactions when it comes to healthcare. A digital front door is a win-win strategy for engaging and empowering patients at every major touchpoint of their care journey, all organized behind an easy to find entryway. It can expand access, drive patient activation, improve operational efficiency, and lower costs—all while satisfying patients.
Digital Health Systems
Provider organizations must now view IT as an operational optimizer, a strategy enabler, and potential industry disrupter. They must also track the fast-changing technologies and IT-related capabilities, and capitalize upon opportunities for IT-powered incremental, sustaining, or disruptive innovation.
EMR Optimization
EMR implementations are never a seamless process. EMR optimization provides a link between system functionality, process changes, and expected future benefits that gives HCOs an opportunity to achieve measurable outcomes and long-term business value.
Interoperability
In health care, interoperability is the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, to exchange data accurately, effectively and consistently, and to use the information that has been exchanged. The rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) coupled with rising clinical and business needs for cross-continuum data are driving a renewed focus on interoperability technologies.
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the addition of intelligence and connectivity to everyday objects through recent advances in low-cost, low-power computing, communications, and sensor technologies.
Natural Language Processing
NLP allows computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from text and speech similar to humans. A subset of AI, NLP can help organizations take advantage of unstructured data found in clinical notes, sensors in wearables, patient-reported data, and genomics.
Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD)
The rapid development and consumer adoption of wearables, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and mHealth apps provide a broad window into patients’ health across the continuum of care. As providers consider strategies to accommodate PGHD into care delivery models, they must make key decisions about how to operationalize the capture, management, and use of PGHD.
Social Determinants of Health Data (SDH)
The US health care system has historically overemphasized the importance of medical care in efforts to improve health outcomes. The result of this disproportionate spend is that Americans fare worse than other peer countries across many measures of health, including maternal mortality, life expectancy, low birth weight, and infant mortality. As our health caresystem shifts toward value-based care, leading provider organizations are studying non-clinical risk factors (e.g., social circumstances, individual behavior, physical environment) and building new models for social care delivery in partnership with owned and community resources in an effort to improve patient outcomes.
Systemness in Health Care
Systemness helps health care organizations better serve and support the broader goals of patients and the health care system, integrate their owned and operated components, and extend IT capabilities to the wider community of care. This transition to a ‘connected care community’ is necessary to successfully implement new care delivery models and drive the formation of a more agile, virtually integrated enterprise.
Virtual Reality
Historically, the high cost of virtual reality systems has been a primary barrier for adoption. However, increasing computing power and the ubiquity of personal computers (PCs) and smartphones has brought a rapid decline in cost, which has made this technology accessible to a greater number of health care organizations.
3D Printing
3D printing already has some footholds in the health care industry, but expectations for this technology have recently grown. The technology has the potential to streamline manufacturing, allowing health care organizations (and eventually patients) to design and produce products on demand, cheaply and efficiently.
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