by Bonisiwe Tshabalala, Senior Industry & Value Advisor at SAP Africa
NAIROBI, Kenya, January 17, 2023 -/African Media Agency (AMA)/- What steps can African countries, healthcare providers and healthcare organizations take to improve the delivery of healthcare services to the 1,400 millions of citizens of the continent?
Africa faces the double challenge of poor health systems and a high burden of disease, especially among the poorest communities. According to a McKinsey report, the continent bears almost twice the disease burden of the rest of the world. Ninety-four percent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa, and tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS are widespread.
Additional pressures from disease outbreaks, such as the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2014, often lead to further disruptions in healthcare delivery, leaving the most vulnerable without the healthcare they need. In fact, less than half of African citizens have access to the health care they need, and when health services are available, they are often of poor quality.
And with the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare systems across the continent, the time has arguably come to radically rethink the delivery of healthcare to African citizens.
Digitization unlocks opportunities to improve care
One of the most transformative developments in healthcare in recent times is the increasing adoption of data and analytics tools to drive improvements across the healthcare value chain.
Demand for targeted analytics of patient data is expected to increase in the coming years as patients increasingly seek transparent access to their healthcare data. In addition, healthcare providers will collect data on patient experiences to continually improve care delivery and other patient-related processes.
For providers, the goal should be to provide quality and accessible health care services to anyone, regardless of location or social conditions. Such care must extend beyond patient discharge, with providers using mobile devices and apps to enhance the patient experience and ensure the highest levels of care throughout the healthcare process.
The rapid digitization of the healthcare industry could see value-based care, which improves patient outcomes and lowers costs, dominate the sector as early as 2025.
Five priority areas and the role of technology
However, to achieve value-based care, providers will need to build intelligent business capabilities that enable end-to-end, data-driven healthcare processes focused on improving patient outcomes. And doing so will depend on how well providers can leverage technology in five priority areas, namely:
Priority 1: operate smart and efficiently
Healthcare providers are under constant pressure over cost and resource constraints. By eliminating unnecessary costs, reducing waste, and freeing up resources for innovation, providers can deliver better care for patients.
In the coming years, providers will leverage IoT and machine learning for further automation, with embedded analytics enabling more agile prediction and simulation capabilities. The use of standardization using global best practices can also reduce variations in clinical care.
Enhanced use of analytics and automation can increase accuracy between front-end and back-end processes, reduce revenue leakage by limiting insurance claim denials, and optimize insurance claims to enable faster reimbursement.
Priority 2: Subscribe to patient results
One of the biggest challenges facing healthcare providers is how to deliver services that deliver optimized outcomes for each individual patient. In the near future, patients will be able to see the value of each treatment option based on key performance indicators and evaluations of other patients facing similar circumstances.
Self-management options can enable patients to make more informed decisions about their treatment, based on accurate data about other individual patients and their specific context.
This will improve the patient experience and support compliance by ensuring patients know what procedures to follow and what documentation to bring to a visit. Reimbursement delays can also be reduced through more accurate patient-submitted data.
Priority 3: enable data-driven decisions
The shift from primarily experience-based care to real-world, evidence-based care will be a top priority for healthcare providers in the coming years. Big data generated by electronic medical records, apps, wearables, mobile devices, sensors, and clinical innovation will create vast amounts of information.
In the coming years, providers will increasingly gain the ability to monitor patients, collect health information from structured and unstructured sources, and use data analytics to understand and even predict health conditions in real time. The application of artificial intelligence, analytics and machine learning can unlock valuable data points that can enable information-driven healthcare delivery.
This will improve the quality of patient care through real-time access to a wide range of medical, lifestyle and personal experience data, while reducing overall IT spend by enabling data visualization across all healthcare organizations using a single platform.
Priority 4: empower health workers
The immense pressure that healthcare professionals work under makes it critical that providers find ways to restructure and retrain their workforce so they can work at their best. The key is to avoid complexity, which increases costs and slows down progress.
Digital tools can allow healthcare workers to reduce paperwork and free time to focus on patient care. Mobile devices can improve the speed of communication to enable just-in-time delivery of critical information and results, driving greater flexibility in your work environment.
By adopting a single platform for talent management, learning management and data insights, healthcare organizations can drive improvements in their human capital management functions, from planning, onboarding and recruiting to payroll, expense management and ongoing training and development.
Priority 5: improve the patient experience
Health care delivery is changing as patients move from passive recipients of health services to active and empowered consumers. Providing a positive and seamless patient experience through digital and physical interactions will provide a key point of differentiation for modern healthcare providers.
Technology will play a central role, specifically technologies that have been designed with an understanding of patients as the primary users of solutions. This will improve interactions between patients and providers and drive greater comfort for patients in their healthcare experience.
This will increase patient satisfaction by ensuring that patients are involved in the decision-making process and are more aware of the treatment and the resulting results. By giving patients ownership of different parts of the treatment process, providers will also improve the efficiency of care and improve patient outcomes.
Distributed by African Media Agency (AMA) on behalf of SAP Africa.
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the publication Five technology priorities to improve the African health sector first appeared on African Media Agency.
Source: African Media Agency (AMA)
