Structured data and unstructured document management capabilities are essential for hospitals in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to deliver patient care in areas where long-term chronic illness is on the increase.
This is according to recent research conducted by EMC and IDC on the future of healthcare in the region. The study is based on interviews with 188 hospital IT and non-IT executives from across EMEA and 12 national and regional government executives in charge of e-health programmes.
Faced with an aging population and an increase in long-term chronic illnesses across the region, healthcare organisations in EMEA must adapt to a new patient-centric system of healthcare, the study noted.
The research, titled "Transforming Health: Enabling Integrated Healthcare", suggests that a new healthcare system - where geographically dispersed healthcare providers collaborate to treat patients - is more suitable than the current hospital-centric system.
Integrated care
According to the IDC-EMC study, an integrated care delivery model increases patient safety and controls costs for healthcare providers across the region. Importantly, the research has revealed that IT - and especially document life cycle management capabilities - will play a key role in this transformation.
Some 51% of hospital executives (46% in Western Europe and 57% in MEA) expect to see their organisations' total IT budgets increase in 2014, while only 7.5% in Western Europe and 9% in MEA expect them to decrease.
Integrated and secure access to data and applications ranked as the most important hospital IT priority, well above lowering the cost of IT.
Hospitals need to be able to share information with other healthcare providers such as GPs and specialists, the study showed, highlighting document management capabilities as an essential tool for this, in that it allows for the archiving, extraction and analysis of patient information in an integrated way.
According to the study, 56% of hospital executives already have a document life cycle management solution in place. Only 7% of Western European hospital executives plan to invest in a new document life cycle management solution over the next 12 months.
Barriers
The research revealed several barriers to the wider adoption of document life cycle management solutions. This is particularly true of budget allocations, which remain focused on maintaining legacy systems.
"Document life cycle management solutions can provide the glue necessary to enable integrated healthcare by decoupling structured and unstructured data from proprietary and open applications alike, including EMR [electronic medical records], HER [electronic health records] and departmental applications, for example, allowing them to be easily transferred to and accessed by the healthcare professionals that need them," says Nkuli Mbundu, enterprise account manager, Information Intelligence Group, EMC Southern Africa.
"The key now for hospitals in EMEA is to ensure that their IT budgets are being invested effectively to create a long-term solution to the challenges of healthcare," Mbundu adds.
Massimiliano Claps, research director at IDC Health Insights, says the aging population and increased prevalence of long-term conditions will have a significant impact on health and social care.
"A sustainable service delivery model that can cope with non-communicable diseases must aim to provide appropriate care," says Claps. "The re-oriented healthcare system will ensure the future sustainability of service delivery by co-ordinating all actors across the value chain. This integrated care delivery will have to be enabled by cross-enterprise information sharing."
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