3 Prominent Challenges to The Healthcare Industry in 2023

Meeting Patient Expectations with Technology.

Ready to go to the local mall for your physical? Or see your pharmacist about your watch app’s alerts about your cholesterol level? These are a couple of potential scenarios greeting the healthcare industry this year. Learn about them and more, as well as the possible solutions to these challenges.

Healthcare to Offer More Individual Patient Care

“Patients are all alike and should be treated as such.”

This deep-seated notion in medicine is being called into question. Advancement in technology, especially, is driving such thoughts. Patients this year will most likely see healthcare personalized geared to them.

What is meant by that? Well, there will be an increased use of precision medicine. This medical model specifically tailors drugs and other forms of treatments based on factors like:

Patient’s age

Genetics

Risk factors for specific conditions (e.g., diabetes and heart attacks)

Patients benefit because they and their providers have greater options about how their care is planned and delivered, given their circumstances, opinions, and belief systems.

This form of “personalization” in patient treatment is also being driven by psychographics, or the study of people’s attitudes and behaviors in decision-making. Some healthcare groups are increasingly looking to address the patient population’s unique needs as well as differentiate themselves in the highly-competitive market. For example:

California-based Medicare startup Clever Care and its focus on the Asian community.

Alignment Healthcare addresses the needs of its Latino population through its “el Unico'' option. Same with Zocalo Health, which provides the same with its “by Latinos for Latinos” clinical group.

SCAN’s Affirm health plan provides healthcare insurance for members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Digital front doors are good starting points for healthcare groups to reach out – and even retain – patients. They can be adapted to:

Provide up-to-date information in the patients’ languages of the healthgroup, clinics, and hospitals.

Provide live operators fluent in the served population’s languages.

Offer educational tools and documents vetted for cultural and/or historical accuracy and sensitivity.

Retail Pharmacy take Primary Role in Healthcare

Retail healthcare is predicted to double this year. Much of this growth is driven by health solution companies like Walgreen pharmacy, Aetna CVS, and Walmart Health. This was in response to the global pandemic in 2020 when many medical clinics shut down due to health and budgetary concerns. Retail health clinics took over as sites for COVID-19 testing, for example. They have since expanded their healthcare offerings. Many now offer traditional services like:

Blood tests

Medical check-ups

Vaccinations

Patients found the offered services more convenient and accessible than medical clinics. They especially like the fact many retailers did not require appointments to be booked in advance.

Unsurprisingly, retail store pharmacies will be the cornerstone for this healthcare model. Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians will see their roles expanded with more direct patient care. Because of this, equipment use in these “retail pharmacies” will increasingly become similar to those found in traditional healthcare clinics and hospitals. To accommodate these changes, they should have patient kiosks powered by a medical box PC to manage patient check-in, and medical tablets with fanless design and IP65 rated sealed bezels for easy maintenance and cleaning.

Healthcare Goes Off-site with Remote Patient Monitoring

Telehealth and telemedicine saw massive growth and use in healthcare during the pandemic as providers and medical staff diagnosed patients remotely.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM), a part of telehealth, is expected to see greater use in 2023. This is driven in part to the aging population. Another reason is the rise of comorbidities, or multiple chronic conditions. These include:

Arthritis

Cerebrovascular disease like embolism

Diabetes

Heart disease

High blood pressure

Joint disease

Mental health issues like depression or dementia

Respiratory disease

Sensory impairment like blindness

Three “Must-Haves” for healthcare groups for their RPMs programs and accompanying wearables are:

Patient Portal Messaging

Care Kits

Optimized Medical PC Workstations

Providers and medical support staff like nurses can use telehealth technology to monitor patients’ health off-site. Many are “wearables”: devices designed to track vital signs such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels. These range from smart “textiles” that can detect blood pressure, to smart gloves capable of detecting and even reducing the tremors suffered by patients with Parkinson’s Disease.

Wearables capable of monitoring and detecting signs of mental illnesses are increasingly becoming available, which can help deal with those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Closing Comment

The healthcare industry faces new challenges with the new year. Three of them - patient segmentation, pharmacy-based primary care, and telehealth – bring new opportunities. Contact an expert at Cybernet if your healthcare group is dealing with these three formidable issues and is looking at medical computers as possible solutions.