Healthcare delivery innovation and consumer preferences shifts has been accelerated due to COVID-19 pandemic. Health consumers are more focused on health, wellness, budgets, and the experience received from their care providers.
Clinician burnout and the “great resignation” are two major hurdles which healthcare systems need to overcome, these impact significant challenges and budget. It is crucial for healthcare organizations to rapidly adapt to meet needs of patients and caregivers. Providers must consider new shifts like flexible scheduling, new care models, enhanced clinical workflows, improved patient access, and maintaining the highest quality of care.
Azure Cloud for Healthcare support organizations and solutions showcase new tools to free up critical resources. This supports customer-centric operating models to facilitate proactive healthcare, creating “customers” for life, and ease the burden on providers and helping facilitate.
Enhance patient engagement
A convenient, personalized, and transparent patient experience can reduce care costs and drive greater patient satisfaction. Satisfied patients with personalized, engaged experience report 36% fewer visits, are 28% less likely to switch providers, and are 5 to 6 times more likely to use other services from the same provider according to a recent McKinsey survey. Patients may generally be more involved in healthcare; satisfied patients feel more empowered to engage in their own health and know they are getting better care which improves overall outcomes.
Latest release has improved patient insights to provide a more enriched 360-degree patient view which is at the center of many healthcare processes. Patient Snapshot in the Unified patient view shows relevant information faster to the care teams. Patient view summary can be optimized with low-code and no-code tools like Microsoft Power Apps which enables an organization to customize their own end-to-end scenarios. Organizations can create unique snapshots meet most relevant use cases and help support better and faster care management.
Patient trends feature in Unified patient view can share patient indicators based on computed measures and insights about patient activities like the number of hospitalizations in the last year or the number of days since the last appointment. Each organization can customize this feature to help measure relevant activities after installation.
Missed appointments means wasted time, resources, and have a significant cost for healthcare organizations. They lead to a decline in patients’ health, adversely affect clinic operations and fixed cost calculations, resulting in unscheduled downtime and overstaffing- ultimately leaving healthcare providers struggling with everyday operations. Research has shown that a patient who has missed appointments in the past is significantly more likely to miss an appointment.
The new Missed appointment prediction is a fully integrated AI solution that helps organizations to use AI to predict the likelihood that a patient will miss their next while providing the users with an explanation of the factors influencing the prediction. These organizations make it possible for organizations to use predictions for taking proactive measures and improving the decision-making process,like to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment, maintain continuity of care, and care coordinators reaching out to the patient ahead of time. Patients in turn have peace of mind knowing their physician’s office is prioritizing appointments that work best for them, ensuring better patient-centric care, and building trust.
Empower team collaboration
Care plans are crucial for healthcare organizations while switching to value-based care to improve the cost and quality of care.With the new update for Care plan management, usability for care providers has been improved, making it easier to create and customize care plans to meet existing workflows and view a patient’s interactions, goals, and activities throughout their care journey.
Organizations using Patient Access solution enable patients to update their care plan with their activity progress through the patient portal.Patients can view care plans, modify the status of an activity, view upcoming, completed, overdue activities.Patients engaged in their own health and wellness are more likely to follow through with activity recommendations and ongoing treatment.Patient journeys comprises of interconnected events from being introduced, admitted, cared for, discharged, and possibly repeating a cycle as a retained patient.
Patient journey templates and tools are about to be released which will help organizations automate workflows across care management, and surface tasks and notifications to improve the quality of the patient journey. This capability will help create even more efficiency and save valuable time of administrative users and care managers who interact with the patients. It also includes out-of-the-box patient scenario templates for maternity care, patient discharge, care plan off-track journeys, and diabetes management.
Data management
Data is a strategic asset for businesses today so getting it right is quite significant. According to Harvard Business Review, organizations that drive transformations through datacan experience a 54 percent growth in revenue and profits, 44 percent faster time to market, and 62 percent enhancement to customer satisfaction.
As part of the ongoing strategy for Azure Cloud for Healthcare, data innovation is at the center of all. Microsoft is making it easier for customers to connect, manage, and leverage their entire data estate.
New Data integration toolkit provides IT administrators and integration specialists tools to set up, configure, and manage their data integration components and they also get a single pane of capabilities. Health data exchange within an organization’s existing landscape becomes easier because of this.
Dataverse healthcare APIs support the bi-directional integration capabilities of FHIR data.These APIs provide a new, improved way to integrate and exchange FHIR data between FHIR endpoints like Microsoft Azure Health Data Services or EHR systems and Microsoft Dataverse.
FHIR R4 inspired data models is used in Azure Cloud for Healthcareto bring multiple systems and applications together by providing a “shared data model” for applications. Provider data model is updated with aset of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities commonly used by customers and partners to build or extend their own healthcare apps leveraging Azure Cloud for Healthcare. Payor data model is about to be released that contains the set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities for health insurers and payors. Health data models simplify app development and data management by applying consistency across multiple apps and deployments and unifying data into common data model shapes. This leads to easier data interoperability across various health data systems and faster innovation.
Organizations today can spend a lot of time defining a consistent and harmonized plan for their clinical and operational analytics, enterprise data warehousing, or lake house initiatives.Industry-specific health database templates in Azure Synapse are data models that act as blueprints and enable organizations to quickly jumpstart their analytics-based industry use cases. Customers and partners can extend and customize these standard templates using the database editor in Azure Synapse. The latest release includes templates for payors, providers, clinical trials, pharmaceuticals, retail pharmacies, and genomics.
Azure Cloud for Healthcare is committed to support healthcare organizations. Partnering in this evolving healthcare environment requires predictive capabilities, rapid response, and continued innovation to help strengthen the resilience of organizations moving forward and realize value faster.
