Disrupt the Healthcare Market by Focusing on Emerging Technology

From AI to robotics to cloud computing, there are numerous emerging technologies in healthcare that have the power to transform patient care. For construction and design firms that are seeking to win accounts and more project scope, it’s important to be aware of new technology that healthcare leaders are considering and evaluating for post-pandemic “hospitals of the future.”

With a deeper understanding of emerging technology, you can align with your target client’s long-term thinking and present more comprehensive solutions that incorporate the use of emerging technology into construction and design plans.

Yes, this could be disruptive. For some healthcare clients, you will be getting ahead of the game by not waiting for them to specifically state they are looking for solutions to help them leverage emerging technology. You can rest assured they’re talking about it internally, though, even if they’re not ready to state it publicly in an RFP. That’s why an intelligent approach is critical to support your conversations with healthcare clients.

Here’s the key. Any plans to utilize emerging technology must tie back to the organizational mission. For most health care organizations, their mission is related to delivering improved patient care and a better patient experience. To be able to talk about how futuristic technology supports the mission, you need to understand the value of each piece of technology.

Emerging Technology in Healthcare You Need to Know About

Healthcare organizations have many technology options at their fingertips. Let’s focus on three primary pieces of emerging technology in healthcare that can help you have better conversations with target clients and eventually craft the right solution.

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The value of AI is to help healthcare organizations in the following ways:

• Increase the speed of patient care.
• Increase the accuracy of patient care.
• Decrease the amount of time required to process data.
• Increase the quality of health information available to treat patients.

When AI is deployed in a healthcare setting, it can be utilized to analyze a lot of patient information and critical healthcare data. This helps physicians, nurses, and specialists better understand what type of treatment patients need. The primary value is the speed at which the analysis is performed. Because seconds and minutes matter in healthcare treatment, access to accurate information in a timely manner is incredibly valuable to support decision-making.

How to play it: The hospital of the future will need real-time access to the analysis generated by AI technology. This should be at the top of the list for how to configure the design plans for hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities to leverage machine learning as part of normal patient treatment.

2. Robot-Assisted Treatment

Over the past year, healthcare workers have made unbelievable sacrifices in treating COVID-19 patients. Robotics cannot replace these doctors and nurses, but futuristic robot technology can certainly help reduce the risk of infection for healthcare workers as they treat patients.

Robotic machines can support services as simple as checking a patient’s vital signs from a different room all the way to helping doctors perform surgeries from a separate location.

– In treating today’s COVID patients or treating future patients who may be infected by the next virus, the use of robotics is valuable to help doctors and nurses provide care from a safe location.

– In the case of robotics assisting with surgeries, a doctor can still perform the surgery, but instead of standing next to the patient, the doctor can control robotic instruments from a separately-located surgical system.

How to play it: When crafting healthcare design plans, it’s important to consider how robotics can be incorporated into healthcare spaces to ensure efficient, safe, and quality care for patients.

3. Cloud Computing and Information Technology

The use of AI, robotics, and other emerging technology like virtual reality (VR) will continue to be a normal part of treating patients the future. But, these pieces of health technology need robust back-end support.

There are many devices that will be used, and each of these devices will produce a significant amount of data that needs to be stored, organized, shared, and secured in health systems. This will require the right-size IT infrastructure to keep costs under control, ensure speed of access for healthcare providers, and protect the integrity of the data.

Electronic health records (EHRs) were under attack from bad actors throughout 2020. In fact, healthcare was the #1 industry targeted by cyber attackers during the pandemic. One study found that the industry experienced at least one breach every day, exposing millions of electronic health records.

As healthcare systems shift toward cloud computing, they will be keenly aware of the need for enhanced security measures to protect patient records when stored in the cloud. Because, if the mission of a healthcare organization is to enhance the patient experience, one of the worst things that can happen is a data breach that exposes patient records, making patients distrusting of the healthcare provider.

How to play it: Construction and design firms that target the healthcare industry should consider building connections with service providers in the IT space. Then, these service providers can come alongside your firm to provide an IT solution that supports your design plans.

It’s about crafting a comprehensive solution that satisfies the larger issues that healthcare systems face when trying to leverage emerging technology. In an industry where hackers are looking for any vulnerability to swipe data and patient records, healthcare systems need end-to-end support for every aspect of how they utilize technology to treat patients.

Talk to RESET About How to Build Authentic Connection

Construction and design firms that are involved in healthcare need to be connected to the issues that are top-of-mind for healthcare leaders, especially emerging technology for the hospital of the future.

Your team needs to be actively pursuing information about the types of conversations that your target clients are having about futuristic technology. Be sure to identify how the deployment of technology ties back to the organizational mission. Ultimately, your role is to build authentic connections with target clients. What does this look like?

• Be informed about the issues.
• Be emphatic about their challenges.
• Understand the larger problem behind the problem.
• Pursue collaboration around solving the larger problem together.
• Understand how to leverage other service providers to craft a comprehensive solution.

Don’t be afraid to disrupt by asking different types of questions and presenting a larger solution that goes beyond the confines of the RFP. If the target client believes that you are coming from a place of understanding and collaborative thinking, they will be receptive.

Your team may need coaching on how to build authentic connection with target clients to have different types of conversations. In this article, we have helped you understand the emerging technology in healthcare that your target clients care about right now. Now, it’s time for you to build your narrative about how you can help clients utilize this technology to support their organizational mission.

We can help. Talk to us about how to create your narrative and connect your impact to each client’s challenges leveraging emerging technology to optimize the patient experience. We look forward to helping you win more accounts and grab larger pieces of project scope to help your firm grow.

– Contact us today to schedule a free coaching session on how to authentically connect with healthcare clients in today’s challenging environment.