Healthcare Delivery in the Information Age

The healthcare industry is uniquely structured so that the receiver of the services (the patient) often isn’t the predominant payer for those services (the insurance company). Healthcare interventions are often complex and typically involve multiple players including providers, payers, patients and regulators. This leads to economic dilemmas such as moral hazard, information asymmetry, and tangential considerations of cost versus quality creating obstacles on the road to delivering efficient and effective healthcare. Relevant data, pertinent information, and germane knowledge play a vital role in relieving these problems and can be most effectively obtained via prudently structured and well designed healthcare technology.Some of the major challenges facing today’s healthcare organizations include demographic (longer life expectancy and an aging population), technology (incorporating advances that keep people healthier), and financial (escalating costs technological innovation) problems. In order to realize technology’s full potential it is imperative to understand the healthcare-technology paradigm, develop sustainability models for the effective use of technology in a specific context, then successfully design and implement patient-centric technology solutions. Many of the problems with technology are connected to the platform-centric nature of these systems which cannot support seamless transfer of data and information, leading to inferior healthcare delivery.This new series focuses on designing effective and efficient technologically enabled healthcare processes to support the delivery of superior healthcare and provide better access, quality and value. It’s main goal will be to identify the barriers and facilitators in moving from idea generation to concept realization and will navigate the key challenges in the field: bringing readers solutions and recommendations while identifying key factors in developing technology-enabled healthcare solutions.