The Medical Industrial Complex: Where Medicine Meets Big Tech’s Bottom Line
For far too long, the hospital industry has been lagging behind when it comes to embracing technological advancements. Today, advanced technologies are slowly transforming the practice of medicine, and hospitals are just starting to catch on.
According to Deloitte, hospitals are shifting towards a data-driven culture to reduce costs and enhance patient outcomes. Technology plays a key role in these efforts, from preadmission forms to data-centred clinical decision support tools. So, is Big Tech profiting off healthcare’s naivety, or are hospitals just a little slow to recognize their own data’s economic potential?
A recent announcement from Busamed Hospital Group might give some insight: its IT department has developed an innovative paperless, single-view solution for kidney care patients, which saves clinical staff about 100% of the time currently wasted on record-keeping activities. On the other side of town, Life Healthcare has integrated Salesforce’s Healthcare Cloud with its current digital infrastructure to streamline renal patients’ follow-up interactions with caregivers and clinicians, and Netcare has even pioneered a more efficient medication-ordering process using cloud- based algorithms.
To dive deeper, let’s start with some statistics:
Hospital groups have spent trillions of Rands upgrading hospital infrastructure with new hospital record systems in the hope to reduce wait times. Still, an estimated 23% of hospital budget was tied down waiting, leaving nurses and healthcare workers wondering “what they did for our healthcare data?”
Big names like Cisco, Huawei and Oracle offer cloud-computer solutions in the quest to reduce capital expenditures but more importantly make healthcare costs per patient skyrocket. Now Netcare reports a sharp boost to clinic throughput speed on adoption the new mobile apps! Does this mark the tipping point for IT-driven reforms of the current healthcare workflow at most providers to further marginalise existing patient-doctor-therapy relationships.
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