Can Integration of Liferay Portal Enhance Patient Experience?
Avakash Dekavadiya
Historically, healthcare institutions have been sluggish in adopting new technology and processes. The artificial intelligence in the healthcareindustry, however, is strengthened by embracing digital transformation to solve traditional pain points in the industry and create integrated omnichannel experiences for patients, consumers, and providers.
In order to know how numerous healthcare providers and organizations around the world have adapted Liferay’s scalable enterprise portalframework to create personalized patient portals, unified electronic health records, updated integrated systems, advanced telemedicine, and efficient intranet networks. Read on below to know more about how Liferay propels digital experience to the next level for the healthcare sector.
What is Digital Experience for Healthcare?
Even those of us who don’t track the advances in health care have an insight into the developments that are taking place there: 3D organ printing, robotic surgery, telehealth solutions, and more.
But even most doctors sigh and mumble something incoherent when it comes to customer experience patterns in healthcare. In the sense of customer service, many health care providers do not think about their jobs.
What counts, though, is what patients think — and they have long since begun to think about themselves as customers, not patients. In other words, the customer experience is no longer exclusive to stores. But let’s try to understand first what is digital technologies for healthcare then we can understand in depth how the customer experience evolves in healthcare.
- Healthcare IT (HIT) is an area of Information Technology for the Healthcare industry.
- Focused on building solutions that will improve medical care and public health, lower costs, increase efficiency, reduce human errors and improve patient satisfaction.
- Received a boost when President George W. Bush incentivized hospitals for adopting Electronic Health Record systems.
- EMR (Electronic Medical Record) is the central component of the Health IT infrastructure.
- EMR is a person’s official, digital health record which is shared among multiple healthcare providers and agencies.
- PHR (Personal Health Record) is a person’s self-maintained health record.
- HIE (Health Information Exchange) facilitates interoperability among a group of healthcare organizations.
Previously, we have conducted a webinar regarding how Liferay is helpful for Healthcare IT solutions. Where we explained how to get personalized on-screen experiences that flawlessly work across multiple connected devices on web and mobile with the Liferay Digital Experience Platform.
Rewind a little and focus a little on what and why Liferay is an important portal to integrate?
What is Liferay?
Liferay is an open-source and free enterprise platform, used mainly to allow intranet and corporate extranet. It is also defined as a platform for web applications or content management. It has all the functionality a website can provide to its users. This consists of a variety of operational units, known as portlets. Liferay digital experience caters to an architecture for enterprises to digitize their business operations, deliver connected customer experiences and gather actionable customer insights. Some of the features Liferay provides:
- Personalization
- Security and access management
- Auditing
- Single-page applications
- APIs for integration
- Collaboration and Social networking support
- Document Management System
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Support for mobile applications
- Fully customizable and extensible platform
- Written in Java and incorporates various standards
Importance of Healthcare Information Technologies?
Without a good digital interface, remote patient care is difficult, but digital technologies can also enhance offline care. It’s even possible to make queues virtual. Because healthcare is now part of the economy of experience, it is important to reduce in a negative way everything that might impact your patient/customer remotely. That means minimizing wait and service times and providing quicker access to care is a must. Digital technologies can help hospitals offer smooth, hassle-free care.
- Enables better care for patients
- Higher quality of health services at affordable prices
- Increases patient safety
- Decreases medical errors
- Improves communication between patients and doctors
- Omnichannel experience
- Centralized document storage
- Higher accessibility
What is the future of Healthcare Information Technology?
Operating with large amounts of information has never been simpler. The rapid progress in analytics, cloud computing, and machine learning has provided us with more data than ever before and the ability to look at it in new ways. Artificial Intelligence in healthcare promises to help us sift through these mountains information and gain new insights that can predict threats before they arise and reduce costs by helping patients escape the hospital.
- The demand for affordable and quality healthcare
- Streamlining of critical processes
- Easier data collection and sharing
- Extremely simplified billing and insurance processes
- Personalized experience through AI
- 24×7 consultation through TeleHealth
- Improved EHR with improved interoperability
- Cloud computing
What are the challenges in the current healthcare industry?
The healthcare industry is currently rapidly adopting new technologies. The information technology, which is primarily used to support doctors and patients alike, and to improve the quality of healthcare services. Electronic Health Record (EHR), where patient information is stored, is the most important part of a hospital information system today.
- Health information protection and data security
- Need for affordable healthcare
- Omnichannel solution
- Integration with existing systems
- Patient engagement
- 24×7 availability of medical services
- Escalating costs in the healthcare industry with rigid penalty fines for readmissions and non-compliance.
- Rising mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations of healthcare systems.
How Smart Healthcare is storming the globe?
Voice-activated virtual assistants, environment-controlling apps, robotic cleaning machines, and more — our world now is what looked like something from sci-fi to a person in the 90s. Automated and remotely-controlled infusion pumps are another example of smart health technology. The beauty of smart technologies is that they make life easier not only for patients but for nurses and doctors as well.
- Appropriate treatments are offered at the right time, right place and for the appropriate patient
- Technology to be used effectively and efficiently to diagnose, deliver care and treat sickness by the clinicians
- All the patient data is accommodated in one place which is easily accessible
- The information available must be used by all care delivery shareholders across the entire ecosystem effectively and efficiently
- Patients are involved actively in all of their treatment plans and minutely informed
- Improved efficiency by a drop in the medical waste
- Bringing healthcare to remote places and to people who don’t have access to it by introducing new and cost-effective delivery models
- Role-based work according to defined roles ( for instance, nurses must handle patient care and should not be involved in administrative tasks)
To combat all these challenges and to provide world-class patient care, satisfaction, and engagement, the healthcare industry requires secure, compatible, mobile and stable IT solution and services that can span across the entire healthcare spectrum to help:
- Manage constantly happening changes
- Collaborate
- Embrace innovation
- Cut down total costs of ownership
- Ensure reliability
Digital Transformation in Healthcare
Digital transformation is digital technology incorporation into all facets of how a healthcare business deals with clients, healthcare providers, and regulators. The results are often innovative, replacing long-standing trends with continuously emerging new processes. What you’re doing is not determined by software. What you do (or how to do it) decides what the software you want to do for you. You need to get a big picture of what the healthcare system is trying to achieve, and look at how different processes can or should work together to achieve those goals.
- Healthcare providers are now focusing on using the exceptional digital experience to meet high standards, comply to government healthcare & healthcare IT regulations, and also stay competitive.
- There is a rise in the need for Digital Experience Platforms due to the demand for personalized, connected experiences has increased.
- Healthcare organizations are looking for enterprise solutions that can unite patient experiences across digital devices and manage multiple touchpoints.
- Digital experience platforms (DXPs) will empower healthcare organizations to provide an exceptional experience to their increasingly connected patients.
Stakeholders in healthcare
Patients, doctors, employers, insurance companies, drug companies, and government are the key actors in the healthcare system. Insurance companies sell health insurance plans directly or indirectly to customers through employers or government intermediaries.
- Clinic / Chain of Clinic
- Hospital / Chain of Hospitals
- Diagnostic Laboratory & Testing Centers
- Insurance Clearing Houses
- Pharmacies
- Telehealth Providers
- Research Institutes
- Insurance Carriers
- Technology Companies
- Patient
- Doctor / Provider
- Biller
- Technicians
- Administrative Staff
- Third-party administrator
What Standards, Compliances & Regulations play a role?
Compliance practitioners in healthcare are needed to help medical facilities and organizations meet the ever-growing government regulations that set patient information confidentiality and use requirements, ensure quality patient care, prevent fraud, and protect healthcare workers.
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
- Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) — IHE’s work is organized into profiles that define how systems should cooperate.
- Health Level 7 (HL7)
- Quality Reporting Document Architecture(QRDA) — a standard for communicating health care quality measures.
- Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP)
- Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) — It is a framework for creating clinical documents that contain both human-readable text and machine-readable XML.
- Other Vocabulary Standards (ICD, SNOMED, RxNORM, NDC, LOINC, CPT)
- Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) — It is a specification for exchanging clinical and administrative health care data.
- Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM)
Healthcare IT Requirements/Challenges
In the last few years, in an attempt to deliver a better customer experience, healthcare has tried to join other sectors. The industry has introduced a major shift from size to treatment quality. Information, internet and cloud technology advances have changed the healthcare industry. The needs of patients are constantly evolving. Patients today demand that their treatment be chosen and controlled. As a result, health care provider approaches have changed to ensure that the emphasis is on the patient experience. Online solutions have already been embraced by many leading healthcare providers.
- User Experience and Customer Centricity (Customer Service)
- Digital Storefront / eCommerce Solutions for Eyecare, Pharma, Other stakeholders.
- Security
- Content Management: Self-managed by end-users ( Marketing team), For Patient Education Portal, etc.
- Multi-lingual
- Workflows and approvals (for claim submission, processing, etc…)
- Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE)
- Multi-tenancy for SAAS and chain of clinic/hospital
- Enterprise Integrations
You can also access our Slideshare files from here to get a clear understanding of this.
Our Liferay consulting services ensure flawless processing of disparate functionalities of Liferay. At AIMDek, we serve across various industries like Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, Automotive, and Banking, etc. AIMDek had been a Liferay partner and has delivered large and complex systems based on Liferay. AIMDek is positioned to offer a wide array of Liferay consulting services such as theme development and customization, collaboration, portals and intranet platforms. We deliver bespoke portal solutions that are cost-efficient to help you attain your strategic targets. We’ve successfully built and delivered :
- End to end EHR for eyecare specialties with various solutions like EHR web and tablet apps, Patient Portal, HIPAA and MU, ePrescribing.
- CDS and Medical Intelligence solution.
- TeleHealth solution on Liferay, available as a white-labeled solution offering.
- Custom CRM for Medical Tourism.
Have a look at this video to get a more clear understanding of how Liferay is enhancing the patient experiences for Healthcare IT solutions.
