The future of health care delivery may look quite different than the hospital of today. Rapidly evolving technologies, along with demographic and economic changes, are expected to alter hospitals worldwide. A growing number of inpatient health care services are already being pushed to home and outpatient ambulatory facilities. However, many complex andv very ill patients will continue to need acute inpatient services.
With aging infrastructure in some countries and increased demand for more beds in others, hospital executives and governments should consider rethinking how to optimize inpatient and outpatient settings and integrate digital technologies into traditional hospital services to truly create a health system without walls.
To learn what this future of health care delivery may look like, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions conducted a crowdsourcing simulation with 33 experts from across the globe. Participants included health care CXOs, physician and nurse leaders, public policy leaders, technologists, and futurists. Their charge was to come up with specific use cases for the design of digital hospitals globally in 10 years (a period that can offer hospital leaders and boards time to prepare).
The crowdsourcing simulation developed use cases in five categories:
Many of these use-case concepts are already in play. And hospital executives should be planning how to integrate technology into newly-built facilities and retrofit it into older ones.
Technology will likely underlie most aspects of future hospital care. But care delivery—especially for complex patients and procedures—may still require hands-on human expertise.
Building a digital hospital of the future can require investments in people, technology, processes, and premises. Most of these investments will likely be upfront. In the short term, hospital leadership may not see immediate returns on these investments. In the longer term, however—as digital technologies improve care delivery, create operational efficiencies, and enhance patient and staff experience—the return result can be in higher quality care, improved operational efficiencies, and increased patient satisfaction.
These six core elements of an enterprise digital strategy can help you get started as you begin to push your hospital into the future: