Effective Digital Transformation in the Postpandemic World

The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the indispensable role health care organizations play in people’s daily lives. However, it also highlighted the critical role digital transformation now plays in enabling fast responses and efficient delivery of medical services by those organizations’ providers during times of immense pressure.

The pandemic made nearly everyone more dependent on technology than ever. For remote office workers, for example, technology has come to represent flexibility. For paramedics and other emergency medical professionals, it can mean the difference between life and death, particularly when dealing with significantly elevated workloads.

The Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) provided a great illustration of this. A huge rise in demand for its services over the last 2 years made meeting the unique challenges of a pandemic while still providing core medical services to the people of Scotland incredibly difficult. Fortunately, an effective digital transformation strategy enabled the SAS to fulfill all its duties through intelligent deployment of connected technology in the field. Switching to digital devices for everything from locating emergency scenes to recording and monitoring patient data has drastically cut down on time-consuming manual paperwork and trips to base for its paramedic teams. As a result, SAS caregivers have been able to spend far more time doing what they do best, treating patients.

Careful Planning

While examples like the SAS make the benefits of digital transformation clear to see, it’s crucial that health care organizations take the time to effectively analyze the scope of the task at hand and plan an approach based on their own unique needs. For many the list of device requirements in particular has grown considerably since the start of the pandemic. Here are some key considerations.

Remote servicing and support—The growing complexity of patient-care encounters and data needs of optimal patient care means applications that enable remote collaboration and support have become extremely important. So too have cloud-based services that allow organizations to preconfigure, reset, and recover devices remotely. The automated nature of such systems has an added advantage of reducing the burden on IT professionals.

Easy disinfection and cleaning—Research suggests COVID-19 can live for days on many surfaces, including laptops and tablets, leading to an increased need among health care professionals for devices that can be cleaned both easily and thoroughly. Fortunately, devices are now available that have been designed with these kinds of requirements in mind.

Reliability in the field—Paramedics often operate under immense pressure and in all weather conditions, which makes reliability paramount. The devices they use must be able to withstand hard impacts and drops, as well as being covered in water, dirt, dust, and other substances that would prevent regular equipment and teams from functioning. Rugged laptops and tablets are purpose-built for this.

Powerful connectivity—For frontline medical workers, sometimes success comes down to something as simple as getting fast access to electronic patient records. Devices with integrated 4G and 5G connectivity make this possible, which is why they have become invaluable to organizations like the Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS). Covering almost 6000 miles of highly varied terrain across the North of England, YAS relies on rugged devices with integrated 4G connectivity to collect and share critical information from remote locations, enabling its teams to provide patients with appropriate care much faster than would otherwise be possible.

While the development of effective vaccines means the threat posed by COVID-19 is now starting to subside, many of the lessons learned about the importance of digital transformation over the last 2 years remain. Now more than ever, ambulance crews and emergency health care professionals need digital solutions that can be relied on in all situations to provide the critical information they need, when they need it. Successful digital transformation can deliver this and so much more, helping to optimize patient care for many years to come.

Paul Waddilove is the managing director for the UK and Nordic states at Getac.