Digital transformation in the healthcare industry is having a tremendous impact on patient care
Patients can now access their medical records or see test results anytime, day or night. Telemedicine is giving consumers more flexibility to consult a variety of doctors, while saving time and money. Wearables are letting people monitor a slew of medical information, such as heartbeat, weight, calories burned, active minutes—even sun exposure. And the internet of medical things (IoMT) can take that data and transmit it to a medical professional in real time, improving patient care.
Digitally transform – while keeping everything running
Yet with all these new and exciting technologies, some experts believe that the healthcare industry is still lagging other industries in terms of digital transformation. Healthcare companies face many of the same issues that others face – limited resources and legacy IT. Add to that privacy concerns, data sovereignty, and government regulations, and you probably could make a reasonable case for why the healthcare industry has struggled.
EMIS Health, UK’s leading software and service provider, is bucking this trend and moving steadily toward a successful digital transformation. Founded almost 30 years ago, the company’s data centers store 40 million patient records that can be securely accessed by 60,000 doctors at any one time. With 10,000 organizations using their healthcare software, they are also the only service provider that works in all major healthcare sectors.
EMIS Health’s digital transformation goal is to continually improve efficiency, service, and patient care. To achieve that goal, they need to deliver new services and functionality as quickly and efficiently as possible. They also needed more flexibility, automation, and a way to optimize their use of DevOps to innovate faster than their competitors. For example, developing an application that allows patients to easily view test results or check to ensure their child’s immunizations are up to date.
Build a better foundation by modernizing infrastructure
Modern infrastructure is important for EMIS Health to achieve this goal. When EMIS Health heard about composable infrastructure, they believed it could serve as an ideal platform to meet their on-premises private cloud needs. Composable infrastructure incorporates compute, storage, and network fabric together as a single pool of resources that can be instantly configured according to specific needs of each application. Everything is defined in software and controlled programmatically through a unified API, which allows a single line of code to optimize the needs of each application.
EMIS Health is currently testing composable infrastructure to provide the flexibility they need to easily and quickly rebuild infrastructure when they need it. They are expecting that composable infrastructure will give their DevOps teams the agility to rapidly scale out infrastructure and deploy new services.
Automated processes will also free up IT staff to improve services, as they will no longer have to spend time dealing with incidents and infrastructure issues. Improved efficiency will mean that EMIS Health can save money and offer even better service to customers.
The best of both worlds with hybrid IT
As part of their digital transformation strategy, EMIS Health is also looking into the possibility of using public cloud for certain research and analysis projects. One example is a proposed healthcare data analytics application, which would aggregate data from multiple systems hosted by different organizations. This type of research could help all healthcare organizations analyze and report data that may play a vital role in improving public health.
By combining on-premise, private cloud with public cloud, many companies are finding that they can run their business more efficiently. Using hybrid IT, businesses are also delivering a new variety of services to their customers and expanding their capabilities to provide better services though analytics.
Needed: Better hybrid IT management
So what’s next for EMIS Health on their digital transformation journey? In this era of more and more hybrid IT deployments, customers are looking for a better way to manage their resources. Using public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises IT, silos of information are created, making it difficult to share information and move applications from one IT model to another.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is one company that is looking at this challenge, recently announcing HPE OneSphere, the industry’s first multi-cloud management solution. Through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) portal, HPE OneSphere gives customers access to a pool of IT resources that spans the public cloud services they subscribe to, as well as their on-premises environments. Using this new tool, organizations are able to seamlessly compose, operate, and optimize all workloads across on-premises, private, hosted, and public clouds. HPE OneSphere also provides dashboards based on different user roles that offer business analytics. HPE OneSphere is designed for IT operations, developers, and business executives seeking to build clouds, deploy applications, and gain insights faster.
Don’t let infrastructure hold you back
The healthcare industry is in a tremendous state of flux due to changes in technology, regulations, and scientific discoveries. Additionally, customers want more information and convenience in order to have better control of their healthcare. Businesses that can adapt to these changes quickly while delivering more to their customers will thrive in this new and rapidly changing world. Businesses that can’t adapt won’t survive.
Using EMIS Health’s Patient Access, a physician and patient access online test results. This new service saves time and improves patient self-care.
About Gary Thome
Gary Thome is the Vice President and Chief Technologist for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He is responsible for the technical and architectural directions of converged datacenter products and technologies including HPE Synergy. HPE has assembled an array of resources that are helping businesses succeed in their digital transformation. Learn about HPE’s approach to managing hybrid IT by checking out the HPE website, HPE OneSphere. And to find out how HPE can help you determine a workload placement strategy that meets your service level agreements, visit HPE Pointnext.
To read more articles from Gary, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog.
