How Enterprise Architecture is Powering Digital Transformation in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is confronting critical challenges including a systemic labour shortage, rising costs (estimated to grow to its highest level in 13 years) and regulatory pressures.

In PwC’s 26th Annual Global CEO Survey, 67% of healthcare CEOs said that labour and skills shortages would have a big impact on profitability over the next 10 years. Just like other industries, healthcare is turning to technology to find solutions – from telemedicine to software-led supply chain management to automated scheduling and reporting to reduce the administrative burden on healthcare staff and minimise the likelihood of missed appointments.

However, many healthcare organisations are finding pivots to this technology difficult as their IT estates amount to a diverse array of technologies, both legacy and new. For example, Lib Dem research has found that 40% of NHS hospitals in England are using out of date clinical equipment, including X-ray machines, CT and MRI scanners and radiotherapy treatment machines that are over a decade old. The complexity of juggling multiple systems, hardware, and software is hindering the sector's ability to fully realise the benefits of digital transformation.

To overcome this, healthcare organisations need a progressive approach that tackles the siloing of systems and enables real-time visibility of operations to make informed decisions and improve patient care.

Enterprise architecture (EA), which provides a strategic framework and wide-reaching blueprint of an organisation’s technology, systems and processes, is the best means to guide the required transformation. Many healthcare and pharma organisations are realising this with strategic deployments of EA software platforms that provide a holistic view of an organisation’s entire ecosystem, allowing leaders to map their current operations and identify where inefficiencies or bottlenecks exist.

It’s such platforms and SaaS-driven advances that have rendered EA more accessible, flexible, and scalable for healthcare organisations in recent years. The potential of aligning technology, people, and processes isn’t lost on the industry. Benefits in the form of streamlined workflows, simplified compliance, and better medical research and patient outcomes through data-driven insights can be transformative. Let’s dive into specific applications.

Key Benefits of Enterprise Architecture in Healthcare

Optimising Data Management

Healthcare organisations often deal with lots of disprate data and are tasked with getting a handle on this to ensure efficiency and maintain regulatory compliance. A lack of unified visibility of electronic health records (EHRs), supply chain platforms and the rest only make that task more difficult.

EA platforms offer a solution by integrating data from these disparate sources into one central ‘pane of glass’ to place alongside information on internal processes and objectives. This offers a holistic view serving as the basis of strategic planning that’s more likely to yield effective outcomes. This is particularly powerful for planning around the IT estate.

A Pragmatic Tech Debt Remedy

Healthcare organisations often struggle with technical debt—the investment required to fix issues with legacy software. Legacy software and infrastructure, even if functional, can become increasingly difficult to maintain and update. This tech debt not only hinders operational efficiency but impacts on an organisation's ability to adopt new technologies.

A lack of integration between legacy systems and modern applications can lead to data silos and heightened risk of IT outages and disruption, such as the critical incident which recently disrupted services across South East London. EA platforms, by acting as a comprehensive view of all IT assets, are a perfectly placed solution to identify sources of tech debt. Not only that—the alignment of business and IT facilitated by EA helps ensure new IT projects don’t result in the creation of fresh tech debt.  

Elevating Patient Experience

In the increasingly digital patient experience, EA can help ensure that digital touchpoints lead to satisfaction. Data from patient-facing applications and services can be fed into an EA platform to grant visibility of patient-facing apps and services in real time. IT teams are then able to pinpoint where friction and negative experiences occur and work with relevant stakeholders to remedy any problems.

As alluded to, EA platforms can also be used to simulate and test digital, customer-facing changes before they’re rolled out. This kind of due diligence greatly reduces the risk of technology transformation impacting patients in a negative way.

Enterprise Architecture: A Catalyst for Healthcare Transformation

Given the numerous challenges facing the healthcare industry, managing technology more effectively is essential for optimising decision-making and improving outcomes. In an environment where each patient’s needs are unique, implementing a robust EA framework is crucial for dynamic strategic planning that ensures digital transformation pulls in the same direction of overarching strategy. By doing so, healthcare organisations can maintain their trajectory towards improved resilience, patient care and operational outcomes.

Topics: HealthTech