Adebayo Sanni, Oracle country director has highlighted that the global healthcare industry is under constant pressure to provide more and better access to care, while managing ever-increasing demands and costs.
Sanni said that even advanced countries with long histories of universal healthcare are reeling under the pressure of increasing populations, especially amongst the aged who expect quality healthcare irrespective of the financial, technical and human resource pressures on national health systems.
According to him, countries like Nigeria that are looking at ways to implement a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) that will ultimately provide cover for the whole population, are also faced with a difficult task.
How can a country with only about 3% of its population benefiting from health cover currently, develop and grow its NHIS effectively to include more citizens.
The Oracle boss described the task as enormous task.
Sanni said, “Even the proposed first step of extending health cover to 30% of the population by 2015 requires careful planning to ensure the roll-out is successful and that it creates a solid foundation for future expansion.
“One of the enablers of modern healthcare the world over is technology. Over the past few years we have seen an increase in investments into electronic healthcare technologies, which hold the promise of improving care and ensuring better outcomes, irrespective of the setting. We are moving from an episodic-based system to a longitudinal system that delivers continuous value.
“The optimal use of technology in healthcare will allow caregivers to deal with any person, at any time, more effectively than ever before.
“Healthcare in the 21st century is far more than simply treating a specific condition or symptom; effective healthcare today means treating the whole person across a multitude of care settings and conditions. Achieving this ideal is only possible with a reliable, integrated healthcare system.
“The question for any operation looking at healthcare provision, whether in a single home or across a vast country, is whether the process starts with the appropriate technology matching the right technology road-map.
“When planned and implemented correctly, this will empower healthcare organizations to meet their immediate challenges, while providing a solid foundation to build on for the future.
The Right Technological Approach
Sanni added that the process through which organizations approach building their technical healthcare solution varies.
Many have taken a tactical approach, purchasing point solutions to tackle each challenge or implementing a service-intensive technology designed to deal with a particular problem, and then building on it as time and budgets permit.
Unfortunately, this approach is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
“Tackling each challenge with a separate product can lead to integration problems in the future that lead to a more complex environment that is much more difficult to support. Far from containing costs, this scenario can potentially drive up the cost of delivering healthcare as well as create new risks and potential safety issues,” explained Sanni. “Many point solutions are just not built for addressing the challenges of integration, data consolidation and operational efficiency. Moreover, because they are designed to solve a single problem, most cannot assist with integration challenges, they only make it more difficult.”
To take advantage of the incredible innovation in progress in healthcare information technology today, Sanni believes it is critical for organizations to look to a strategic partner that can provide vertical solutions as well as deep integration with underlying technology and mission-critical applications. Ultimately, this delivers a platform that delivers today’s requirements and will meet future growth demands, irrespective of the direction healthcare takes.
Oracle is the global leader in connected healthcare solutions. It delivers strategic capabilities, such as the secure exchange of health records that complies with regulations. More importantly, it also delivers meaningful benefits to the end user – the patient.
“Our connected health solutions provide accurate healthcare of information when and where it’s needed and we assist in improving customer engagement, continuity of care as well as long-term care capabilities from different service providers. Additionally, Oracle does this while providing the ability to seamlessly integrate new and exciting technologies such as tele-health and remote medical devices into the solution,” noted Sanni.
Technology is obviously not the only issue that needs to be addressed when contemplating a national health system such as the NHIS.
However, the right technology provides the starting point for all that is possible in healthcare.
In the past, there has always been a disconnect between the patient, payer and provider.
Today, technology is giving us better ways to enable collaboration and ensure service providers are able to deliver quality care on a long-term basis.