Is your healthcare organization planning to make a digital transformation?  Are you wondering what this means and what impact it might have on your established processes?  At Cisco, digitization means connecting people and things; and making sense of the data in a meaningful and secure way.  Using this definition, it is clear that digitization has the potential to affect every aspect of care delivery and operations for provider and payers.

InThe Digitization of the Healthcare Industry, we have defined five digital imperatives that can make a profound difference when using technology to transform patient care and staff workflows:

1. Making Your Business Interoperable
   The foundation of the healthcare digital transformation is an interoperable environment that enables the secure sharing of information across all levels. For example, the Cisco Converged Clinical Workflow family of solutions helps patients, clinicians, administrators, and families use data, voice, and video to collaborate more effectively to make better decisions, increase teamwork, boost productivity, and reduce costs.
2. Securing Data and Systems
   To address new and continuing security challenges, digital transformation extends data and physical security across the system: to protect information and safeguard patients, and to help healthcare organizations manage financial, legal safety, quality, and compliance risk. As a world leader in network security, Cisco relies on an in-depth methodology that prevents, defends, and remedies problems across the entire network while meeting regulatory and compliance guidelines.
3. Empowering a More Efficient Workforce
   Mobile devices, RFID tracking and location services, and relevant analytics can help make healthcare providers as productive as possible.  Collaboration solutions, such as video and web conferencing, allow the entire care team to quickly and securely share information.  Data gathered from traditional sources can be combined with data from new sources, such as mobile networks, in-camera video diagnostics, medical devices, equipment sensors, and even social media, to support real-time problem solving and to empower staff so they can spend more time caring for patients and less time chasing down the information they need.
4. Creating an Environment to Support Innovative Decision Making
   Digital transformation moves patient care to a new level of intimacy and information.  By analyzing every piece of data across channels, operation, and patient outreach, you will be able to gather insights to make decisions that provide personalized care options. With the flexibility to adopt innovative approaches, healthcare organizations will be more responsive to market change, patient demands, and new approaches to care in order to develop an intimate, always-evolving relationship with the patient.
5. Cultivating the Right Partners to Create New, Disruptive Processes
   Building the best network of vendors, partners, and contract workers is critical to an impactful digital business transformation. The best partners have deep, healthcare-specific expertise across analytics, security, and cloud, with the ability to provide not only IT services, but also strategic business consulting assistance.

At Cisco, we believe that the healthcare industry must embrace disruption and take a business outcome approach to achieving digitization. Providers and payers need to partner with companies who are able to clearly demonstrate how digital solutions align with their business goals.

Read moreabout how Cisco is positioned to guide and lead customers through the digital transformation by using technology to define, document, and measure outcomes in order to dramatically improve patient care.