Readers Write: Unification of Content Will Unlock the Next Phase of Healthcare Innovation

Unification of Content Will Unlock the Next Phase of Healthcare Innovation
By Greg Samios

Greg Samios, MBA is president and CEO of clinical effectiveness of Wolters Kluwer Health. 

The pressures and challenges in the healthcare environment are numerous, from dealing with financial constraints to coping with severe staffing shortages. The situation is concerning and getting worse: 16.7% of healthcare facilities anticipate critical staffing shortages, one in four nurses plan to exit the profession because of overwork and understaffing, and disruption from cyberattacks has put many healthcare facilities on the brink of closure.

The stark reality is that 60% of physicians’ questions go unanswered daily and more than one in every 20 patients experiences preventable harm, incurring costs that are associated with medication errors of approximately $42 billion USD globally. 

Yet healthcare executives must strive to deliver the best possible patient care amidst continually evolving circumstances. The shape of healthcare has changed with new care delivery models for where and how healthcare is provided, from retail clinics to virtual health. Within this cyclone of change, healthcare enterprises are seeking scalable solutions that can not only improve patient outcomes, but also drive care team efficiencies and reduce care variability.  

Each day, healthcare providers turn to information and technologies to make care decisions and educate patients. Content and data underpin the continual information stream, but too often that content is based on disparate technologies that lack harmony, leading to inconsistent care decisions and inefficiencies that may exacerbate care variability.

In many cases, this disconnect is the result of solutions being added at different times to address different needs while forgetting to consider how they fit into the clinical workflow. For example, as COVID-19 arrived, many healthcare providers pivoted quickly to solutions to support remote and virtual care out of necessity. For many organizations, this resulted in relying on “best for need” vendor solutions to fill in immediate gaps, but not necessarily best address long-term, enterprise level goals. Today, however, like many industries, healthcare is looking for fewer vendors in seeking consistency, efficiency, and cost savings. 

Looking at this issue, the unification of content is a necessary next step for healthcare to facilitate seamless decision-making at the point of care and across the healthcare ecosystem. Harmonized content makes healthcare delivery easier for all members of the healthcare team, who can access the same information for treatment, drug dosing, and patient education to support better care.

Having consistent content also creates a vital underpinning to support and coordinate high quality patient care and eliminate care variability as healthcare adopts innovative technologies such as generative AI. In fact, both physicians and consumers have expressed concerns about the source of the content that is driving GenAI healthcare solutions, making it even more critical that there is a trusted and unified content solution for healthcare.

Unified content and solutions help align care teams and administrators to work together, rather than in disparate workflows, to deliver the best care for patients and position themselves for success in meeting current and emerging health challenges.