This theme of HIMSS 22 is “Reimagine Health” and I cannot think of a simpler way to describe what Avanade has been doing with our healthcare clients recently. It’s been two plus years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and this HIMSS event comes at a great moment to reflect where we are in the healthcare industry and how we will move forward, with technology, to deliver the very best in care.

At Avanade, we see transformational thinking and solutions needed for three main areas: Patient experiences, care team collaboration and clinical & operational insights. Patients are craving a better experience. One that leaves them feeling like their provider knows them, understands them and can deliver care and wellness the way they want it. Care team collaboration is a way to improve the clinician experience and their productivity. Better collaboration among clinicians and care teams can reduce burn out and lead to better care outcomes. Finally, unprecedented amounts of health data, if managed and used properly can lead to insights that can help clinicians and administrators immensely.

Better patient experiences
Top of mind is providing an enjoyable patient experience. Patient experiences happen in the patient portal, in the waiting room, on the phone, on a telehealth session and many other points of patient-provider interaction. When they happen, we want the patient to feel like it is a personalized, engaging, productive, easy and convenient experience. We’ve only begun to realize the ways technology can help ensure that every patient interaction with their provider feels this way.

At Avanade, we’ve created a ‘patient concierge’ that keeps a patient connected, informed and prepared on their health & wellness journey. We’ve also delivered telehealth and virtual visit solutions that go beyond traditional voice and video. For example, our virtual visits solution provides access to a wide range of language translation services as well as the ability to have a virtual visit without a laptop or having to download special software. Just a mobile iOS or Android device is needed.

Our mission is to discover every point of interaction the patient has with their provider or payer and optimize that experience as well as find ways to be proactive but not bothersome in creating an enjoyable health & wellness experience.

Better care team collaboration
Today’s healthcare workforce is stretched to the max. Providers are short-staffed and clinician burn out is real. Avanade is working hard with providers to help them deliver collaboration tools that leverage technology to reduce workloads on clinicians, to allow better communication across care teams and to make the workforce happier and more productive overall.

Avanade has helped providers deliver collaboration solutions such as virtual rounds, virtual nursing huddles, virtual tumor boards, virtual consultations and more. These virtual and digital solutions not only help keep clinicians safe in the pandemic, they also can provide digitized, shareable, storable records that can be mined for useful insights.

When personalized for healthcare, these technology advances can deploy automation where it makes sense, to take non-patient facing tasks off a clinician’s plate to reduce burnout and allow them to spend more time doing what they like best, taking care of patients.

Better clinical and operational insights
As I’ve mentioned above, patient to provider as well as provider to provider interactions are being enhanced by innovative technology and tools. Now think of the treasure-troves of health data that exist internally and external to your enterprise. The ability to access that data and use it to its maximum potential to power experiences, collaboration and INSIGHTS is what allows us to get to the ultimate goal of better health outcomes at reduced cost.

It starts with identifying and gathering as much data we can – clean, useful, relevant data that impacts everything from organizational operations to patient care – to glean insights that can be used to create productivity gains, good employee experiences and optimal patient care. With these data insights, we can better practice precision medicine, create care plans, study population health and facilitate research and development programs that in turn will create the next generation of healthcare innovations.

Solutions are available NOW
It’s important to note that innovation for better experiences, better collaboration and better insights are taking place now, both with and for clients as we speak. We’re actively helping our healthcare clients transition to a cloud-enabled, digitally enhanced and virtually capable world.

I invite you to hear one of our clients speak about their recent innovative experience with Avanade by attending Transformation Is Dead: How to Thrive Amid Constant Change, an education session featuring Seattle Children’s Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer Zafar Chaudry and my colleague Dan Schimmelpfenig, Avanade’s Global Organizational Practice Lead.

Dr. Chaudry states, “Challenged by numerous initiatives that were creating a chronic condition of ‘juggling eggs’ for our clinical teams, we at Seattle Children’s decided to take on change in a new way. The hospital sought to lead instead through a human-centered approach by building processes and governance to deliver trusted engagement and collaboration across new care models, allowing our entire system to thrive amid constant change.”

Seattle Children’s has deployed many of the technologies I have talked about here, taking advantage of Azure for Healthcare and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Be sure to add this session to your agenda.

Be sure to join the session on ‘How to Thrive Amid Constant Change’ on March 17 from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. (ET) at the Orange County Convention Center, W414A.

You can also visit with us at HIMSS on the conference floor inside the Accenture booth, #3347.