Industry Success: The Healthcare Sector

The Healthcare sector is one of the largest components of the global economy, consisting of hospitals and medical service providers, manufacturers of medical equipment and drugs, insurance providers, and a wide range of services and facilities for Healthcare providers and patients. From a technology standpoint, the industry is moving from their paper-based processes and legacy systems and slowly-but-surely embracing newer technologies -- including the latest collaboration solutions.

According to recent research from Deloitte, global health care expenditures are expected to continue to rise as spending in the sector is projected to increase at an annual rate of 5.4 percent between 2017-2022, from USD $7.724 trillion to USD $10.059 trillion. 

"With financial sustainability, care delivery, patient centricity, digital transformation, and regulatory compliance at the top of the agenda, health care sector leaders need to collaborate with all stakeholders—both within the health care ecosystem and those in converging industries—as they look to shape the future of health care and establish a sustainable smart health community.

"Aging and growing populations, greater prevalence of chronic diseases, exponential advances in innovative, but costly, digital technologies—these and other developments continue to increase health care demand and expenditures. Health care stakeholders—providers, governments, payers, consumers, and other companies/organizations—struggling to manage clinical, operational, and financial challenges envision a future in which new business and care delivery models, aided by digital technologies, may help to solve today’s problems and to build a sustainable foundation for affordable, accessible, high-quality health care."

Internal and external collaboration is imperative to Healthcare organizations who need to work closely with external agencies, research institutes, government departments, facilities and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and many other service providers. Bringing external users together to collaborate securely on projects can have its challenges, including:

• The need to quickly and efficiently onboard hundreds or thousands of users from different organizations to collaborate together.
• Enabling different user roles and access rights – from medical practitioners and provincial partners, to researchers and patients.
• Keeping personal data and medical records secure, limiting visibility to only those who have the right permissions.
• Streamlining processes and IT administration so that teams see operational improvements.
• Full transparency across a process or platform, with solutions that can be quickly audited.

Investment in collaboration, such as SharePoint and the broader Microsoft 365 platform, can help Healthcare organizations improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the services and solutions they provide. Investment in collaboration can lead to better usage of health data in research supporting personalized health care, and in supporting and augmenting workers, allowing highly trained resources to focus on more valuable, patient-facing activities. (Deloitte)

Extranet User Manager has an extensive experience in the Healthcare industry, helping create better collaboration experiences for medical staff, patients, partners and service providers. To learn more about our specific experiences within the sector, take a look at the EUM Healthcare Industry Success site.