In today’s digitalized healthcare environment, the quality of decision-making vastly depends on the quality and availability of the underlying data. Smart data integration can make a major contribution and help to increase the quality of decision-making, especially in healthcare where clinical decision-makers face multiple barriers and challenges along the patient pathway. Complex decisions in healthcare may fail because data is inaccessible or too extensive to evaluate, information is overlooked, or guidelines are ignored, which can lead to inefficient and costly workflows and compromised clinical outcomes.
Key takeaways
- Digitalization is a continuous transformation. Today’s IT architectures must be flexible, able to grow with changing needs and integrate new features.
- Digitalization is changing the very nature of medical decision-making itself. Medical decisions will continue to be the responsibility of doctors – and patients. Nevertheless, the individual human actors in the care process will increasingly have to make use of advanced digital decision support to bring the wealth of data into their deliberations and use it in a profitable way.
- Healthcare providers and their patients can vastly benefit from a digital healthcare infrastructure. Especially if it is as simple as possible, yet versatile and adaptable, ideally in the form of a system-wide platform for networking data.
- Healthcare providers need access to a steadily growing number of intelligent applications that can meaningfully prepare networked data for specific operational and clinical questions.