Stay up to date with the latest trends in healthcare IT to gain perspective on how your business stands in the marketplace today and assess how you can get ahead of the curve tomorrow.
1. Advanced Security
Cyber threats are rising at an alarming rate. Cyber crime has now developed into a highly organized and profitable industry. Due to the persistence and sophistication of today’s attackers, it’s not a matter of if, but when an attack or breach will occur. Furthermore, cyber attacks are increasing in related costs not just due to the immediate damage they cause. Their pervasiveness and widespread collateral damage is proving to be horribly disruptive to both independent organizations as well as entire industries.
For example, “Hacking Hospitals,” a two-year study by Independent Security Evaluators, reported that healthcare organizations are dangerously exposed to many attack vectors such as unsecured medical devices, Microsoft Windows machines, and phishing emails. Forbes reported that, “According to the 2014 Fifth Annual Study on Medical Identity Theft—released by the Medical Identity Theft Alliance (MIFA)—the number of patients affected by medical identity theft increased nearly 22 percent in just the last year…Of the 2.32 million Americans who have been victims of medical identity theft, almost 500,000 were in 2014 alone.” This isn’t just highly damaging to individual patients. Healthcare organizations, the ones primarily responsible for safeguarding patient data, are charged with indemnifying their patients. Beyond having to shell out enormous legal fees to help patients recover their identities, healthcare organizations are also tasked with restoring their own reputations and bolstering lost patient/customer confidence in a highly competitive marketplace.
Theft of electronic health records (EHR) is damaging enough. Ransomware attacks can create exponentially more damaging and even dangerous effects. With ransomware 2.0 on the rise, a successful ransomware attack can take an entire organization hostage by encrypting an organization’s own system against them. Think about the damage resulting from even just an hour of a hospital not being able to function—it would be like reverting back to medical care in the pioneer days.
What do all these severe cyber threats amount to? The absolute necessity for comprehensive cyber security, spanning from core infrastructure all the way out to the extended network and remote endpoints. Advanced, integrated security can reduce your attack plane, defend all attack vectors, and protect your entire organization before, during, and after an attack.
IT professionals shouldn’t just look at cyber security as a necessary expenditure though. Advanced, unified security does more than defend your assets and data both on and off premises. Security is a business enabler. It allows you to:
Enable and secure your digital architecture
Reduce risk and improve customer protection
Improve employee mobility and virtual collaboration
Enhance customer satisfaction
Increase employee performance
With this next-generation, integrated security defending your organization, you can stop cybercriminals zeroing in on your industry. When planning your security budget, it’s important to consider the overwhelming costs, time, harm to your customers, and legal issues that can result from just one successful attack.
2. Digitization
Digitization is the connection of data, things, people, and processes. Enhancing communication and connectedness throughout your organization is especially important as you continue to add devices, collaboration tools, and other layers to your IT environment. Digital architecture capabilities range from interactive experiences to remote employee services and from protecting customer records to securing mobile devices. You can embark on a successful digitization journey by implementing end-to-end, integrated security. This makes it possible to apply the same high level of security to all your branches, not just your central corporate office. You do not need to limit services or reduce the volume of sensitive data you handle in order to prevent cyber attacks. Digitization gives your employees and customers secure access to on-demand information whenever, wherever, and however they need it.
3. Smart, Connected Capabilities
The Internet of Everything (IoE) is quite similar to digitation in that brings together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before. IoE turns information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and even entire countries. The Internet of Things (IoT) is similar to IoE, but quite distinct in its rapidly growing applications throughout our daily lives and ever growing love of personal technology. This is essentially the growing development of the Internet in a manner that allows everyday objects to have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data.
Wearable devices represent a trend that continues to gain momentum, create massive revenue-generating opportunities, and provide helpful solutions for consumers. Forbes reported that “411 million smart wearable devices, worth a staggering $34 billion, will be sold in 2020.” InformationWeek reported that health and fitness wearables are predicted to account for 28 percent” of those sales, which is expected to continue increasing at an exponential rate. The following are some of the most popular wearable devices trending now.
Oura Ring: This wearable device showcases the movement beyond wrist-based devices, spilling over into the fashion industry. Oura developed a wellness ring that tracks and analyzes a user’s rest and sleep. One of the unique capabilities of this ring is its ability to share its rest and sleep data once it is within range of a smartphone, versus needing to continually transmit the data back to a mobile phone.
Ear-O-Smart: This device represents another fashion-forward health and fitness wearable device. Made by BioSensive Technologies, the technology enables these fashionable devices to monitor heartrate, calories, and activity. The fashion design of the earrings can easily be swapped out around the sensor technology to match clothing. Ear-O-Smart is not yet available, but can be reserved for future purchase.
Valedo: This devices provides an entertaining an engaging way to address potential back ailments. Made by Hocoma, Valedo digital back therapy devices incorporate gamification in having users go through exercises to strengthen their backs. The system includes two motion sensors and 100 medical tape strips, as well as a USB charging cable.
Fitbit Charge HR: While this device was brought to market over a year ago, the device software was recently updated. It now offers automatic exercise tracking features for heartrate and activities such as running, sports, aerobic workouts, and outdoor biking. Fitbit has also been trending toward fashion-forward options, offering very stylish bands and housing for their sensor technology.
Jawbone Up2: This is often considered the archrival to Fitbit. To remain competitive, the Jawbone Up2 has also been updated. Improvements to this wearable health and fitness device include longer battery life as well as water-resistance. Jawbone up2 includes smart coaching with its mobile app, which can also work with other third-party apps.
Apple Watch: This device incorporates high-fashion while offering health and fitness features such as tracking walks and counting steps, in addition to many more.
Valencell PerformTek: This technology delivers health and fitness tracking, such as heartrate monitoring, with the assistance of biometric sensors embedded in earbuds, wristbands, and other devices. Valencell PerformTek is licensed to its partners and doesn’t market directly to consumers. You can find their technology in biometric earbuds such as Jabra’s Sport Pulse and SMS Audio’s BioSport.
TomTom Cardio + Music: This fitness tracker provides a fun and helpful variety of features, including heartrate monitoring and workout recordings. The wrist band can also play music without needing a smartphone.
4. Improved Mobility and Virtual Collaboration
With optimized mobility, your employees can access vital records, data, resources, and tools, whenever and wherever they need them. Enhanced mobile service and virtual collaboration capabilities allow for safe cooperation between executives, field technicians, mobile clinicians, administrators, and generalists. For example, virtual physicians can take advantage of secure portal gateways via VPN and SSL for easy access to electronic health records and imaging.
5. Increased Data Demands
Today’s data centers present new value-added opportunities for you to grow revenue and expand your business. Advanced solutions make it possible for organizations to deliver faster and more responsive services. The latest consumer IT offerings, mobile technology, and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) enhancements provide opportunities to improve your business growth and agility. Your data center infrastructure must be able to scale with your business in order to sustain new growth.
Data powers every inch of your business. It guides clinicians and administrative leaders in their decision making, planning, and much more. Missing information can be highly damaging to your business. For example, without the right data, it’s a difficult and time-consuming process tracking skilled nurses throughout your organization in an effort to make sure you have the right resources where they need to be. Enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) provide a strong backbone to meet such data challenges. An EDW enables users of all backgrounds (both technical and nontechnical) to analyze near real-time data easily through analytics applications. EDWs meet the growing demands for access to high-quality, accurate data, helping you improve care and reduce costs.
However, the risk of loss, theft, and malicious exfiltration has the potential to make data equally damaging as it is helpful. Today’s data centers store vast quantities of sensitive and critical information. You’re challenged with virtualizing environments, keeping pace with increasing performance tasks, adopting cloud computing, and incorporating next-generation network architectures. This is in addition to securing your data center resources, protecting your business-critical information, and defending against advanced cyber threats.
A flexible and threat-centric data center defends against today’s sophisticated attacks, while supporting the performance demands of your business. Security must be designed for the data center, offering the agility, protection, and control you need. Adopting a portfolio approach to the defense of your data center delivers secure business applications and services. It provides protection without compromising the speed or agility of your data center. You can deploy integrated, blended security to establish a threat management system to detect threats and mitigate risk. Secure your data center assets, endpoints, mobile devices, virtual machines, and private cloud across the entire attack continuum—before, during, and after an attack.
6. Leaner IT Staffs
Regardless of the size of a business, small to enterprise operations are demanding that more be down with less. As virtually every industry continues to experience increased marketplace saturation, they need to maintain highly aggressive objectives to stay competitive. The challenge is that their budgets don’t always match the means necessary to achieve their objectives. All of this highlights the growing trend towards leaner IT staffs.
One of the primary areas that’s been helping IT accomplish more with less is automation technology. Advanced automation technology minimizes the volume of tasks that require hands-on interaction, which allows smaller IT departments to handle more tasks, quicker. Automation technology can sometimes come with a higher upfront cost, but it does pay for itself over time by reducing operational expenditures, making it worth the initial investment. Assessing the tasks you spend the most time on will help you gauge which automation technologies to research for your organization.
Technology that provides alerts, sometimes referred to as impact flags, helps lean IT departments stay on top of what would otherwise be too many elements to track on their own. This type of technology can also offer triage, providing priceless prioritization. This helps lean IT staffs improve their decision making and better delegate how they use their time. Among other significant benefits, this ensures issues with the highest potential damage are addressed first.
In addition, strategic partnerships also continue to trend upward. In order to accomplish more with less internal resources, businesses are partnering with affiliates for synergistic, symbiotic relationships. Assess which specific IT resources you need the most of as well as which resources you’re leanest on or are most time and money consuming to produce or manage on your own. This will help you refine your list of candidates for strategic partners.
