How Covid-19 Accelerated Healthcare Digitization

Updated on November 8, 2020
Vispi Daver Whatfix Headshot copy

By Vispi Daver

Digital technology meets hands-free care and then takes off

Sometimes innovations follow an orderly pattern of diffusion as they spread across a particular occupation or population over time.  Successful ones typically begin with adventuresome risk-takers willing to try them out, and eventually conclude with near-universal adoption once the lagging segment of that population finally gets on board.  But there are other times, where a jolt to the system abruptly alters that methodical pace.  Take the case of healthcare.  

Until this year, the adoption of digital technologies by hospitals, physicians, and clinics had, for some time, followed a predictably orderly pattern, gently nudged along by studies, seminars, professional publications, and government agencies encouraging its use.  Then Covid-19 hit.  Suddenly, the measured use of new digital technologies surged.  Patients were reluctant to visit their doctors.  During March, outpatient visits dropped an astonishing 60 percent, but telehealth visits increased by 46 percent across the whole spectrum of healthcare facilities1.  

That’s when the use of medical electronics went bonkers, resulting in a cascade of benefits for providers and their patients.  For example, ePrescribing, a secure method for transmitting prescriptions from physicians to pharmacies electronically, had been introduced in 2003.  By 2017, it had gone mainstream, accounting for 66 percent of all prescriptions, including both controlled and non-controlled medications.  But in 2019, it spiked to 80 percent, and for non-controlled substances, 86 percent2.  

In addition to getting accurate drug information in highly legible form to the pharmacist, the use of ePrescribing has been able to sharply reduce the abuse of paper prescriptions for controlled substances nationwide.  By last year, more than half the states had statutory electronic requirements for opioid prescriptions, protecting both patients and apothecaries against fraud.  ePrescription systems are designed to be compatible with state-mandated Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances technologies which can integrate prescription data into the patient’s Electronic Health Records, or EHRs.  They are also compatible with eCR – state or local mandates to electronically report specific diseases, including Covid-19 cases, to public health agencies.

Those EHRs are beginning to benefit from advancements in application programming interface technologies, or APIs.  They offer patients the ability to increase access to their own health information and make it much easier for clinicians searching specific information, such a patient’s vaccination history, to do so with just a few keystrokes instead of plowing through hundreds of paper document pages to find it.  Having that information in hand can provide essential support for clinical decisions involving a wide range of treatment or diagnostic issues.  Beyond that, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has issued an interoperability rule to make EHR systems from different vendors more compatible3

In addition to technology making mandatory reporting easier, the back-office systems of essentially every medical center are also prime candidates for digitization.  Insurance, scheduling, accounting, personnel, procurement, contact management, asset tracking, document storage, and all the other administrative tasks which support a clinic’s operations – tasks which have traditionally been carried out using paper-based and legacy systems – can also be high-value beneficiaries of digital transformation.  However, those aren’t the sorts of assignments that attract public attention and excitement.  

The sexy applications of digital technology are those that directly affect a patient’s health.  For example, what about building a virtual digital health twin armed with data from multiple sources including healthcare providers, insurers, and the patients themselves, providing an integrated view of that person’s state of health and helping them make better choices?  That was a vision advanced by U.C Irvine Vice Chancellor Tom Andriola4.  Data animating that twin can be readily augmented by dozens of connected devices in the home as well as by wearable and mobile technologies, all of which help to monitor an individual’s health status.  The result: greater visibility into the person’s condition and treatment plans.  

Artificial intelligence in many forms is already gaining a foothold in healthcare information technology.  It is on the brink of being widely used to perform detailed analyses of diagnostic images and supporting physicians in identifying patterns through recognition software informed by image databases from all over the world.  It can improve new models for clinical trials, allow earlier detection, more accurate diagnoses, speedier drug development, faster identification of rare diseases, more accurate prediction of procedural risks, and better treatments. 

It can also end drudgery.  One of the chronic problems affecting the recruitment and retention of volunteer firefighters is that most of the volunteer’s time is spend writing grant applications and filing required incident reports.  It’s boring and exhausting work, leading to burnout.  It’s much the same in medicine, where far too much of a physician’s time is spend writing notes, placing orders, and keeping records.  Soon, AI will be able to capture the relevant information from each clinical encounter, giving physicians and their patients alike a far better experience. 

Earlier this year, Dr. John Halamka, President of Mayo Clinic Platform, wrote that his health system’s digital transformation had been accelerated by ten years due to the pandemic5.  “Covid-19 has reshaped the culture and the policy around the use of technology,” he said.  “Anything we thought would take a decade to do is going to be an expectation for next year.”  The pandemic, as terrible as it is, has placed current trends in digital healthcare technology on steroids in a way that everyone stands to benefit. 

Vispi Daver is SVP of Global Sales at Whatfix based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Vispi works with the Whatfix Sales team worldwide and with Global 1000 Prospects and Customers across verticals and industries.  Before Whatfix, Vispi was with Sierra Ventures, a Venture Capital firm, and he focused on investments in the Software Industry.  Prior to Sierra, Vispi was with McAfee, an industry leading Security Software company, in Product Management and Corporate Development.  Vispi is a graduate from Yale University.

  1. https://ehrintelligence.com/news/covid-19-triggers-eprescribing-direct-messaging-increase 
  2. https://ehrintelligence.com/news/what-is-eprescribing-and-why-is-it-vital-for-providers-patients 
  3. https://ehrintelligence.com/news/how-the-interoperability-rule-apis-could-reduce-clinician-burden
  4. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/digital-transformation/20-bold-predictions-for-health-it-in-the-next-5-years.html 
  5. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/digital-transformation/pandemic-sped-up-mayo-s-digital-transformation-by-10-years-dr-john-halamka-says.html 

The Editorial Team at Healthcare Business Today is made up of skilled healthcare writers and experts, led by our managing editor, Daniel Casciato, who has over 25 years of experience in healthcare writing. Since 1998, we have produced compelling and informative content for numerous publications, establishing ourselves as a trusted resource for health and wellness information. We offer readers access to fresh health, medicine, science, and technology developments and the latest in patient news, emphasizing how these developments affect our lives.