Meeting digital health needs with the right digital infrastructure

In this virtual discussion, tech leaders stressed the importance of having the right digital infrastructure to deliver connected care.
10:55 PM

[Top left-right]: Raj Kurup, Digital Strategy Lead for Healthcare, Equinix Asia Pacific; Chad Rajapakse, Client Account Lead in Health and Public Sector, Accenture Australia
[Bottom left-right]: David Stupple, National ICT Director, Calvary Health Care; Andrew Pearce, Senior Digital Health Strategist, HIMSS Analytics (Moderator)

Credit: Courtesy of the participants 
 

The year 2020 was one of the most challenging years for the healthcare industry. Many healthcare providers had to rethink the way they serve their patients, access systems securely and innovate care services and delivery.

During the "The key to effectively harnessing digitisation in healthcare" webinar on 23 June last year, Raj Kurup, Digital Strategy Lead for Healthcare at Equinix Asia Pacific and Chad Rajapakse, Client Account Lead in Health and Public Sector for Accenture Australia, emphasised the need for digital infrastructure in meeting today's increasing digital health needs.

David Stupple, National ICT Director of Calvary Health Care, also joined the discussion as he talked about the hospital group's digital transformation.

The sudden shift to digital

If there is one silver lining in the COVID-19 pandemic, is that it has allowed healthcare systems to transform faster than they probably would have in the past, said Stupple. 

It was more of good management than luck that Calvary was able to put in place a private cloud infrastructure two weeks before lockdowns were instituted across Australia last year. That foundation also enabled the hospital network to ride the pandemic wave early. 

"I think leveraging private or public cloud has allowed us to be agile," Stupple said. 

Kurup added that it was not smooth sailing for some healthcare organisations. Those that functioned on legacy systems struggled in innovating their digital foundations to meet the challenges that the pandemic brought. 

"This was not something that a lot of them planned for. This is not a business continuity plan that a lot of them had in their books. So it was entirely something out of the blue that they had to address," Kurup stated. 

That is why, for Kurup, building the "right" digital infrastructure or foundation is quite critical. 

"Because if you don't have the right foundation, then what you're going to add on top [of existing infrastructure] is essentially more inefficiency; it's going to add more flexibility challenges, cost challenges and open up more security risks as well," he said.

Building interconnectivity and interoperability

The traditional approach of running data centres may "not sufficiently meet" the increasing demand for digital health, Kurup explained.

To meet those digital health needs, ensuring systems interconnectivity and interoperability is crucial. The key to this, Kurup said, is to move from a "fixed, siloed" system to a "more distributed and dynamic" architecture. 

Accessing "rich ecosystems" is imperative to effectively connect and exchange data or offer new digital health services. Citing Equinix's study done last year, Kurup said "healthcare continues to be one of the fastest-growing sectors when it comes to adopting interconnection, which essentially means that the ecosystem of value for healthcare is growing".

According to Kurup, interconnection does not only help improve performance and achieve scale but also enables quick innovation through service integrations. 

Digital infrastructure enables emerging tech 

With a digital infrastructure in place, Calvary, for instance, was able to perform remote patient monitoring at home in Adelaide, South Australia. Its "hospital in the home" project commenced in December in partnership with MediBank. So far, the service has covered over 500 patients, who have given "excellent feedback" on the arrangement. 

Stupple used to think that using emerging tech that enables care innovation such as remote monitoring was a "bit of fantasy". 

"But now, we're looking at all different types of IoT devices, Bluetooth-enabled devices," he said.

Both Rajapakse and Kurup noted the acceleration of healthcare's digitisation in the past few months. Accenture has assisted in accelerating vaccine rollouts through expedited development of applications for clinicians. In Equinix's case, most clients have increased their uptake of hybrid multicloud platforms, which add more value to their core infrastructures. 

To get further insights on how Equinix can help healthcare organisations, click here.

Want to get more stories like this one? Get daily news updates from Healthcare IT News.
Your subscription has been saved.
Something went wrong. Please try again.