The Healthcare Digital Backbone

By Ashok Balasubramanian, Head, Services Transformation Group, Syntel

The healthcare industry is undergoing significant transformation with wellness and personal devices exponentially increasing the reach of what was termed as healthcare access in traditional terms. On the other hand, cost and regulatory compliance pressures are pushing for improved efficiency. While it is a paradigm shift from a consumer perspective, it does impose significant changes on the IT side as well. The B2C shift as well as evolving reimbursement models will result in innumerable changes in interactions. It is no more a provider administered IT interaction, but device and app based self-service.

This changes healthcare IT from a professional product to a consumer product, irrespective of the stakeholder. While on the use case there are changes on how the business is designed, it requires structural changes on the back end IT to provide an always on, globally available, highly scalable system. These also have to be rolled out before the next digital startup company will disrupt established business models. Combining with regulations and economical drivers, all of these have to be provided at reduced costs.

Better, Cheaper, and Faster! A holy triad that has been elusive to achieve together. But thankfully while the technology has powered mobile, social channels and on boarded exponential use cases into healthcare, the same technology is powering cloud based technologies that are nearly zero touch and self-service IT delivery models. These are becoming more mainstream into traditional IT through next generation automation technologies. Payers and providers are integrating with devices to obtain valuable data that post-analytics can help reduce costs while improving outcomes. IT has embraced virtualization across application and infrastructure assets in what is being termed as software defined everything.

We are seeing two broad areas of automation in IT that is helping build what we can term as the “Digital Backbone” that are transforming IT to achieve always on business and faster time to market with better quality, all at lowered costs.

1. Automated Operations – a highly automated operations platform that brings in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and IT automation to deliver always on business.
2. DevOps – a highly automated development platform that helps healthcare providers develop and deliver newer functions much faster to market with higher quality.

Automated Operations holds strong potential to truly enable a 24X7 backbone at fractional costs. We are now used to asking Google Now or Siri for the weather or talking to an IVR system for ticket changes. Automated Operations is similar function applied to enterprise healthcare processes and systems – for example, a virtual medicine cabinet that the insurer integrates with your smartphone calendar through APIs. Sure, we have robots helping in complex surgeries and they sure can provide significant efficiency and cost advantages in simpler activities like filling in claim forms or enrollment forms or document requests all the way to tracking the availability of an enrollment or grievance and appeals system and ensuring that it scales up automatically if there are more user requests or restores systems if they go down in milliseconds. All these ensure that there is high efficient, always on operations at a fractional cost.

While Automated Operations keep the lights on at lowered costs, succeeding in change is critical to business. DevOps can help providers implement strategies that leverage newer digital technologies rapidly. The next generation of DevOps involves three core philosophies:

1. Implement automated testing based on requirements so that the product is compliant to functional requirements.
2. Automate all support steps of development, from environment provisioning to building and deploying software so that the release time collapses and developer productivity improves considerably.
3. Implement an automated governance process that enforces security compliance, architectural compliance and process compliance so that the product is built first time right.

This integrates the concept of quality engineering and quality compliance and ensures a superior product release much faster than traditional development models.

Automated Operations and Next Generation DevOps will transform the healthcare digital backbone and make it Always ON and Scalable for the next generation innovations. Time will tell which of those innovations would become mainstream and which wearable could be a passing fad. But with a highly automated digital backbone – your IT is ready for all!

About The Author
Ashok Balasubramanian heads Syntel’s Services Transformation Group. He has more than 14 years of experience in business and IT transformation. His team leads Syntel’s SyntBots program, which delivers intelligent automation to help enterprise clients achieve faster time-to-market and ”always on” IT, while reducing costs across automated processes, DevOps and IT operations.