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Surya Gummadi, Health News, ET HealthWorld

Surya Gummadi, Health News, ET HealthWorld

Time to address the  increasing demand for hyper-personalized consumer experience: Surya GummadiShahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Surya Gummadi, SVP & Head of Healthcare, Cognizant, to know more about the digital innovations that are transforming the way healthcare is administered and delivered.

What are the critical factors that have provided the impetus to technology adoption in the healthcare sector?
The global pandemic has spurred a tectonic shift in health care. Health care providers around the world have embraced telehealth, virtual care, and remote monitoring with speed. Consumer preferences have changed, and they are demanding more control over health care decisions, whether it’s choosing an insurance benefit or a treatment. And health care players are providing meaningful digital engagements to their consumers while crossing boundaries to deliver care anytime and anywhere.

The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption; however, it cannot be delivered without interoperability, secure data management, and digital capabilities built on modern IT infrastructure. While recent market studies show that within the first six months of the pandemic, the healthcare industry consumed five years’ worth of digital automation, future success will depend on how the industry deploys and sustains this pace of digital adoption.

What according to you are the future ‘key business transformation’ challenges and opportunities in consumer engagement?
As consumers take a more active role in managing their care, they will demand a seamless and real-time collaboration with their providers at various touchpoints of their healthcare journey. The biggest challenge for the business is addressing this increasing demand for hyper-personalized consumer experience, enable and deliver value-based care with improved health outcomes.

As economies open, an efficient and highly digitized ‘healthcare supply chain’ will play an essential role in how healthcare is sought, administered, and delivered. Providers that adapt to these shifting realities, digitize, and prioritize the consumer healthcare experience across entities, devices, and channels will be best poised to gain market share and consumer loyalty. Getting there will require leveraging advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies/models to enable hyper-personalization of consumer experiences and services, modernise core systems, and pivot to agile and scalable tech infrastructure.

Please tell us about ‘Rise of on-demand healthcare as per patient convenience and key digital innovations driving critical healthcare delivery?
The rise of on-demand healthcare has enabled innovation at scale in the industry. In the new normal, access to anywhere, anytime personalized healthcare is changing the in-person patient-doctor dynamics. AI, Cloud, and intelligent machines are transforming the way healthcare is administered and delivered. In high-risk demographics, for example, diabetic patients are being monitored remotely through smart, wearable devices. Linked to a centralized platform, the doctors can remotely monitor patients through a seamless and secure data exchange on Cloud.

Similarly, enabling real-time and easy access to doctors and medical specialists has contributed significantly to expanding on-demand healthcare. However, seamless and efficient solutions are key to securely enable and link Telehealth platforms to electronic health and medical records while ensuring data privacy in highly regulated environments.

Could you highlight for us, the top digital healthcare resets that are top priorities for CXOs (ex: collaboration, faster time to market etc.)?
Consumers are at the epicenter as digital technologies continue to make sweeping transformations in healthcare. From making rapid strides in remote patient engagement to automating ‘claims processing’ and ‘authorization’ real-time over the Cloud, digital technologies have become great enablers, making specialized tasks more efficient and transparent.

Spurred by accelerated digital transformation, the adoption of emerging technologies is also driving exponential data growth. With data siloed across different data warehouses and transactional systems, making informed decisions poses a considerable challenge. ‘Data lakes’ can unleash the true potential of consumer data, help build a comprehensive view, and steer informed business decisions. Furthermore, the Cloud is the new heartbeat of Healthcare IT, allowing for solutions that address the industry’s current pain points while paving the way for future innovation and faster time to market.

Please share key focus areas/vision for the Healthcare vertical at Cognizant?
Health Care was one of the first verticals incubated in Cognizant around the beginning of this Millenium. Today, it is one of our largest business units, and with our market-leading Platforms and Services we are showing strong year-over-year growth. As a pioneer in healthcare technology, we continue to invest at the intersection of Healthcare and Digital (by modernizing and digitizing our products and building new digital solutions) – to help our clients with their Digital transformations.

A recent example of our client momentum is John Hopkins Healthcare, an internationally recognized leader in healthcare, who turned to us to transition their Medicaid (US government health care program) and commercial lines of business from legacy platforms and operations to our leading BPaaS solution. We’ll be providing a modern, scalable cloud-based platform to enable John Hopkins HealthCare to be a more robust, flexible organization that can deliver better, more affordable patient outcomes.

With healthcare remaining a top priority globally, we are enabling leading healthcare providers to transform their business models and provide value-based care that improves health outcomes while lowering overall costs.

What are some of the benchmark innovations in the healthcare domain you foresee, shaping the industry?
Health Care providers often struggle to access a patient’s medical history scattered across disparate systems. Interoperability can be a game changer enabling seamless data exchange on a unified data platform. Empowering consumers with complete control of their health information requires innovation across key inflection points in the value chain. For instance, a 360-degree patient profile, will make it easier to predict the risk to a potential health issue and tailor consumer engagement proactively.

Population health management will go a long way in building holistic solutions for humanity, ranging from improving chronic disease management to improving vaccination rates and providing preventive care. Once linked through AI and ML technologies, there will be better outcomes and improved delivery.

Finally, digital acceleration has also put the limelight back onto security issues. Much of the world’s move to online involves sharing personal or business information remotely, with an ever-wider number of entities. With people suddenly wearing masks, facial recognition as a biometric identifier has become a conundrum. One solution may be – ‘Cardio ID’ – which will detect an individual’s unique cardiac rhythms using an infrared laser and turn them into something between a password and a personalizer — truly a future with heart.

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