As a healthcare institution, your aim is to support your clients in living well and as long as possible. To achieve this, now and in the future, you have to overcome major challenges. Not only is there is a shortage of staff and a declining attractiveness in healthcare careers. Your clients also require more care, they live longer and they prefer to remain at home for longer. But, you know all that. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

Dutch healthcare institutions try hard to be a good employer, improve efficiency and provide better care. But it’s a lot to aim for at the same time…. Unless you’re also examining your way of collaborating and your use of technology.

You’ve been considering how to organise and deliver care differently for some time now. So, you already know that you will meet many difficulties. On a technical level, but also in the organisation. In a series of six articles, of which this is the first, we share our view of the role of technology in the future of healthcare.

Theres a lot to do, and for one, you’re going to need a new, agile IT strategy, but don’t have to do everything at once. If you build a solid foundation now, you will soon be ready to innovate gradually and your digital foundation gives you the agility you need to use innovations that become available.

What does the future of healthcare look like?

The future of healthcare is uncertain, but there are obvious challenges that need a solution. One of them is the workforce. A quarter of the Netherlands’ workforce currently works in healthcare. But if we don’t change healthcare, we will soon need more people who are willing to work in healthcare. And they are becoming hard to find.

To keep healthcare accessible and affordable for everyone with the available staff and budgets, we should aim for these goals in the Netherlands:

1. Arrange care differently.
   In this first step, the question is: how can we provide the same care, but more efficiently and effectively, without compromising client safety and satisfaction. For example, we can use technology to deliver care in different locations and times, by someone else, or remotely. We can also, with the help of technology and data, plan more efficiently, reduce redundant work and paperwork and communicate better. Diagnoses and checks can be done faster and more effectively with an ‘extra pair of eyes’. This could be a colleague who observes remotely, but also an algorithm that assists the professional – based on data points.
2. Provide care differently.
   The next step is to actually provide different care. For example, by using technology to make sure that clients can go home sooner or even stay at home completely. Industry professionals have many ideas for innovating healthcare, IT must be ready to support innovations and make them work smoothly.
3. Focus on prevention.
   Prevention not only improves the quality of life of clients, it also saves a lot of money. The earlier you intervene with a client who is worsening, the less effort is required for such an intervention. Data is essential for optimal and efficient prevention, so we must make data available and shareable.

Start building the foundation now

Healthcare institutions have been preparing for years to be ready for these developments. But there is still a lot of work to do. IT teams are small and often busy keeping the network operational and updating applications. And therefore not with building a foundation for innovation. And of course the daily maintenance of the landscape is important, but as a healthcare institution you also need to quickly find an answer to the question: ‘Where do we want to go with healthcare in the next 10 years?’

This requires a comprehensive transformation of your organisation, your culture, your skills and your technology. Making minor adjustments to the current environment is not a solution. That environment consists of separate applications, with the ECD as the most important, in which the data is stored. That makes collaboration and exchange difficult. A lot of data is also stored in text fields, PDF documents and memos. Digital systems cannot use that kind of data. While when using new techniques, such as machine learning and forecasting, you want to be able to combine data from different sources. If you have to start that transformation when you want to start using new technology, you will be behind.

So now is the time to liberate your data. Because it is time to start working and collaborating differently. To think less ‘application-oriented’ and from the ECD and to move towards ‘platform thinking’. That is more than a technical change. It is a change of culture and mindset. These types of changes take time: changing your internal culture can take 3 to 5 years.

That’s why you have to start now.

Cloud strategy as an innovation platform

You need a clear and ambitious cloud strategy to address this challenge. But it would be wrong to view the future of healthcare only as a technology issue. In our vision, the cloud is the platform for innovation that you use to find and adopt new ways of working.

The shift from an application mindset to a platform model also enables the formation of a ‘care ecosystem’, where all actors in the chain – general practitioner, hospital, rehabilitation centre, physiotherapists, elderly care, GGZ, GGD, but also, for instance, municipalities and police services – share knowledge and information, collaborate better and ultimately organise care differently together.

And one innovation leads to another, because your organisation becomes more enthusiastic, while cloud technology gives you more control over security, privacy, compliance with regulations and budget. And we see this happening in the market. There are very nice collaborations happening, for example between GGDs and home care, but also more widely. There we see that the intention is there, but that technology is often the limiting factor. A common cloud platform, with a well-designed data lake and applications that work together, would speed up these developments greatly.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: The platform for healthcare innovation

Microsoft created an industry cloud for healthcare to help healthcare move to a cloud platform fast and safely. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is a key platform for healthcare innovation, it aims to find the balance between ready-to-use functionalities and offering space to build your own processes or work with third-party tools, and provides possibilities for integration and exchange beyond your own organisation.

Cloud for Healthcare is not a complete system that contains everything, but an open model that you can connect to various platforms and systems. Essential applications, such as the ECD, still work independently and there is enough room to choose applications that are not from Microsoft. We see Cloud for Healthcare mainly as a great inspiration for the future. The vision behind Cloud for Healthcare is based on four main themes:

1. Inform the client.
   When a client has more information, they have a better experience and the healthcare institution saves a lot of work by providing self-service.
2. Help professionals communicate more effectively with eachother.
   Cloud for Healthcare offers alternatives to phone and physical consultations, which makes existing processes more efficient.
3. Assist to practitione.
   Practitioners spend too much time on a computer. Microsoft recently acquired Nuance, an AI application that can turn conversations between practitioner and client into text, as well as recognise medical terms, symptoms and treatments. It can also largely report automatically in the ECD. This saves time, it helps the practitioner focus more on the client, it improves the quality and completeness of reports, and it creates structured and useful data.
4. Improve logistics operations.
   Almost all other industries use data to improve their logistics processes. A healthcare institution is not a warehouse or a metal workshop – the processes are complex – but there is still room for improvement in this area. For example, sharing client data quickly, easily and securely makes it easier to transfer care to another, specialised hospital. Tracking absenteeism helps you forecast whether you will have enough staff next week.

“Most new healthcare applications are cloud applications,” says Frank Stavenuiter, former Healthcare Lead at Microsoft. “This means that your data also has to go to the cloud to be able to use it. The core of your data platform is then your data lake. The more data you bring together, the more you learn. Bundling data from different healthcare providers, for example, helps you compare the results of different treatments and thus generate new medical knowledge. To make this possible, Microsoft is building an open platform that provides space for all kinds of innovations and all kinds of providers.”

In addition to this series of articles, we are organizing, together with Microsoft, the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare.”

Experts and experienced experts will tell you during this event:

• How to take the first step towards a cloud platform as a basis for healthcare innovation and regional cooperation
• How cloud technology and data will shape the future of healthcare, for example by facilitating the move from curative to preventive
• How data exchange radically improves chain care
• How a digital workplace frees healthcare providers from time-consuming manual work and makes their work more pleasant and efficient
• How a modern workplace contributes to retaining and attracting healthcare professionals
• How to break free from the limitations of your EPD and organize your care process the way it works for you
• The vision of other healthcare organizations on the future of healthcare

Register now and don’t miss it

Complete the form below and you will attend the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare” on April 18.

Other articles in this series: 

Better chain care with the cloud

Improving collaboration with chain partners is a common goal in many places. And working together means more than ‘knowing each other’s contact and calling in emergencies’. Most institutions and healthcare regions know this well. And across the Netherlands, healthcare professionals, administrators and IT professionals are looking for ways to make things work better. More and more healthcare institutions are realising that they cannot do this alone and need to share data with chain partners. Because your healthcare institution is often just one link in the chain. On a platform of freed data you can create care that is less laborious, but more effective.

Improve Care, Reduce Stress and Cut Out Admin: Build Your Automation Platform In 2024

You cannot support every care process in your ECD. Healthcare institutions that have tried to do this for years are now left with a system that is difficult to maintain that does not cooperate with other systems and chain partners. Low code solutions such as Microsoft Power Platform can be a solution. There are also many processes in healthcare that are not yet digitally supported, such as preventive monitoring of clients or calling for help from a colleague. There is still a world to be gained with smart automation in these ‘unstructured processes’.

Better care, less stress: The impact Teams Calling in healthcare

Healthcare is a fast-paced field. When the phone rings, or a client presses an emergency button, the situation may not be obvious at first. A cloud platform can integrate telephony with other communication modes and supplement the conversation in a secure way with data that matches the context. This way everyone is aware of what is happening and what the next step should be.

How to be an appealing employer for home care workers in 2024

As a healthcare provider, you want to manage your work well and be a desirable employer. A modern digital workplace reduces a lot of annoyance and needless manual work for your staff. It is also a crucial component in all digital workflows and in making data available.

Data as a driving force for healthcare innovation: ZorgSaam is building a platform for the future

How does a data platform contribute to better care, improved patient experiences and more efficient healthcare work? And how does it ensure that you, as a healthcare institution, are ready for the future, even though you don’t know 100% what it will look like? ZorgSaam knows, because they built a powerful data platform that forms the foundation for groundbreaking healthcare innovations. With a data platform on Microsoft Azure, ZorgSaam can work on data-driven decision-making, user-friendly access to information and other data applications for future-proof care, without technical barriers.