Speaker 1: Technology can be a key enabler for health care organizations throughout the world, but what exactly are the best technologies to help you navigate the 21st century and beyond? I'm going to talk about that here today. My name is Eric Kimberling. I'm the CEO of Third Stage Consulting. We're an independent consulting firm that helps clients through their digital transformation journeys, and health care organizations have gone through quite a bit of change over the years. Everything from regulation to pandemics to financial pressures, all sorts of dynamics have changed the face of health care as we know it. And along the way, health care organizations have struggled to remain profitable and continue growth and to provide the patient experience that they want to provide. So what I want to talk about today are the 10 technologies that can best enable you to accomplish your goals as a health care organization. Now this isn't a countdown per se, so I'm going to walk through the 10 technologies that are most important to health care organizations in no particular order. Now the first and probably the most common and well-known technology for health care organizations is EHR software, electronic health records. This is a type of technology that allows health care organizations to track clinical information, patient information, billing information, scheduling, telehealth, basically all the patient-facing, patient-experienced type of processes and all the data and records that go behind that. Some of the common and most popular vendors that provide this sort of technology include Epic and Cerner, for example. Although there's other technology providers out there, these are the most common ones. But EHR is one of the most fundamental aspects of health care technology today and one that you may want to consider for your health care organization. Now health care organizations spend a lot of money on everything from supplies to medicines to equipment and testing, so there's a lot of opportunities to save money and to really pool your resources and leverage the size and scale of your organization. And that's something that procurement and supply chain management software can do. It can help you make sure that you understand where you're spending your money, which vendors you're spending your money with, which vendors are performing, delivering on time and delivering the quality you expect, sort of a supplier scorecard. And it really gives you visibility to be able to make the best purchasing decision for your organization to not only reduce costs but also to get the best quality and the best patient outcomes that you're looking for. So if you're looking for a way to really optimize your spend, procurement and supply chain management software can be a great way to do that. Now some examples or a example of procurement software would be something like an Ariba. That's a software that allows health care providers and other organizations to really track their procurement, their vendor relationships and that sort of thing to really optimize their spend and their level of patient care. Now we've talked about the technologies that can enable a better patient experience and that can automate some of your procurement processes, but there's also the back office financial and accounting side of things. Really tying together all this data to really look at the bottom line results of how well your health care organization is performing. And most of the technologies I've talked about so far don't have that capability necessarily built in their software. So many health care organizations find that having a standalone software to handle their financial and accounting needs can be beneficial. So accounting and financial software not only helps you track the books in your general ledger, but it helps you get deeper into the analytics of your health care organization. So for example, what is the average cost per patient? How much are you spending per patient? Or which patients are you most profitable with and which patients are you losing money on? Where are your prices optimized and where are they sub-optimized? Those sorts of analytics and data related to your financial performance can be very powerful in a very effective way to ensure that you have a more profitable and effective health care organization. Now if you're a larger health care provider and an inventory intensive health care provider, you may have your own warehouses and it may require you to track your inventory, track locations of inventory, track what orders you need to trigger to fulfill inventory shortcomings or demand from the different locations of your organization. So with that automation need in mind comes the opportunity to use warehouse management systems or WMS as they're often referred to. These are systems that help automate the entire pick, pack, and ship process, the receiving process, if you do cross docking or if you have a sort of Kanban warehouse where once the inventory gets to a certain level you automatically trigger more orders. That's the sort of thing that a warehouse management technology can help you do. And there's a lot of common warehouse management providers out there like GDA and Manhattan Associates. Those are just two examples of two types of WMS systems that can help automate some of your warehouse operations if that's something that's important to your organization. So a fifth type of technology that can help your health care organization is human capital management. And human capital management is another phrase for basically HR technology, HR systems. And that's really the technology that helps you identify and attract talent. It helps you track recruiting functions. It helps you track new hire processes. It helps you track performance management, benefits, payroll, all that sort of stuff that goes into human capital management. And also resource management as well. Scheduling and making sure you have the right types of skills in the right place at the right time. So anything to do with your people and your human capital management can be automated and made more effective with human capital management software. And this is especially important for health care organizations that have ebbs and flows and demand for their labor force or organizations that might suffer from attrition. These are just a few examples of cases where health care organizations can benefit from human capital management. Some common examples of human capital management systems include Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, for example. Those are probably the two most common ones. Oracle Talent Management is another one. So really look at technology as a way to automate some of those employee-facing processes that are important to you as a health care organization. Now of the five things we've talked about, I may have presented them in a way that sounds like those are five distinctly different technologies. The reality is there's a sixth type of technology that incorporates some or all of those five that I've talked about so far. And that type of technology is enterprise resource planning or ERP software. And ERP software is really just another name for a fully integrated system that ties together multiple functions across an entire organization. So while I talked about financials and accounting and human capital management, procurement, EHR, all the different systems I've talked about so far, ERP systems are single systems that try to do all those things well. Now the catch to ERP systems is while they are more integrated and provide a more seamless user experience, they tend to not succeed at being everything to everyone within your organization. So in other words, you can probably find better HCM systems out there than what most ERP systems can provide. So HCM is typically a module within ERP systems, but those modules within an ERP system oftentimes aren't as strong as if you went out and looked at a HCM specific technology that focuses only on that one area. So that's the trade-off you have to look at, but for many larger organizations especially, ERP systems can be a good way to consolidate all the technologies that I've talked about so far. Now one of the more emerging technologies that isn't necessarily a standalone technology, but it can be embedded in some of the other technologies that I've talked about so far, is artificial intelligence. Machine learning is another common interchangeable term with artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence and machine learning is a way to take data from your patients or even financial information and try to anticipate what is going to happen in the future. So some case studies or examples of how artificial intelligence can help is if you look at patient data, some of the clinical data that you have from your patients, artificial intelligence can anticipate what a potential diagnosis might be or what a potential solution might be for that particular patient situation. Another example on the financial side would be to anticipate where discrepancies are in your accounts payable processes. So as you receive invoices and you process invoices, artificial intelligence can flag the invoices that fall outside of certain parameters or don't fit the pattern of usual business. So these are just two small examples on a broader scale of how artificial intelligence is being used more and more by healthcare organizations, which have the benefit of being very data intensive organizations because you're tracking so much information and so many different data points from your patients, from inside the organization, your financials, your billing, everything that goes into the organization. There's a lot of data there that can be used to leverage artificial intelligence. The Internet of Things is another emerging technology, not just in healthcare but even on the consumer side. Anyone who wears an Apple Watch or uses an iPhone or any other sort of device, technically that is Internet of Things. You're tracking information, you're tracking diagnostics, you're tracking information and data at a very micro level and Internet of Things really takes devices and bits and pieces of data to consolidate it to make use of that data. So as you track all this information about your patients, for example, you're getting a lot of different diagnostics, a lot of different information, not only during their visits and during their the customer experience or the patient experience they have with you, but also when they're away from your organization. And so the key here is how can we use data and track data from other data sources to help create a more complete picture of the health profile of your patients. So that's just one example of how Internet of Things is an emerging technology that's being increasingly used more commonly by healthcare organizations. If you're a larger healthcare organization with a lot of different projects happening, whether it's new construction or internal projects, project management software can be a very powerful way to track and manage some of these internal initiatives. And project management software can oftentimes be embedded within a broader solution like an ERP system, but for the most part we find that project management is sort of a standalone technology because it's so specialized and it's so different from what other technologies can do. Now project management software isn't just for tracking tasks and deliverables and milestones, although that is a big part of what it does, but it also tracks costs and assigns costs to different activities and really allows you to track the value of a project and allows you to track the cost of the project as well. It also helps with resource optimization and assigning resources to projects and managing resources in these projects. So there's a lot of complexities that project management software can help you manage if you're the type of healthcare organization that has a lot of internal projects going at any given time. Just as many healthcare organizations spend a lot on supplies and drugs and other types of costs, there's also the bigger ticket items that involve capital spending. So it could be anything from building a new hospital or a new wing within your hospital or buying new equipment. These are all assets that need to be managed and maintained and repaired over time and enterprise asset management is a type of technology that allows you to optimize the spend on your assets. It allows you to get the most out of your assets. It allows you to use predictive analytics to figure out when your assets need maintenance or repair. Those are just a few examples of how enterprise asset management can help. Now EAM systems can be standalone or they can be embedded within a broader technology like an ERP system, but it is something you really want to hone in on if you are a capital intensive organization and if you have a lot of assets that you're managing on your balance sheet. Now this video is intended to give you an overview of the 10 technologies that you should be considering for your healthcare organization, but there's a lot more to learn. There's a lot more to dig into so I wanted to include some resources below that'll give you some more information to think about and some more best practices around evaluating potential technology options and deploying some of these technology options. So I encourage you to download some of those links below. Most notably we have our 2021 Digital Transformation Report which includes evaluations of different technologies in the marketplace, comparisons and independent rankings of technology, as well as some of the best practices for deploying technology within your healthcare organization. So I hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day.