Digitisation Healthcare industry

Many industries are already very advanced in terms of digitisation. But not the health sector: With an index of 24%, the healthcare industry ranks second last. Only the digital identity with 23% scores even worse. This is despite the fact that digitisation in the health sector is regarded as the most important lever for greater productivity and quality.

Productivity: According to a study by Deloitte (2017), the savings potential that digitisation can offer Swiss hospitals is just under CHF 300 million. Alongside other initiatives, this potential can be delivered with greater transparency in quality.

Digitisation will help Swiss hospitals save CHF 300 million.

Quality: This is primarily about a holistic view of conditions for patients. The use of new equipment, for example, promotes transparency in terms of the patient’s health by improving communication and access to information for every stakeholder in the care process. This allows hospitals to fill the gap between the current and required degree of digitisation among customers and channels, which the study above suggests is the largest.

An important aspect in communication is undoubtedly feedback to staff from the patient. Patient satisfaction is considered a reliable quality indicator. However, changing patient needs means that hospitals are faced with ever-increasing demands. If they are to keep pace with this dynamic, a deep cultural and process shift towards patient-centredness is needed. This also means that investments in digitisation should be targeted at this.

Patient satisfaction is becoming increasingly important as a quality indicator.

So where to start?

What we want to deliver must first be measured. If patient orientation is to be the goal in the process of digitisation, actively and promptly surveying patients to get their opinions makes sense. In brief: Taking patient satisfaction seriously as a quality indicator.

Giving patients bits of paper and pens so they can complete a questionnaire is still standard practice in the healthcare industry today. However, this contradicts digitisation and has many disadvantages: Staff have to typing in the completed questionnaires, evaluation is tedious, results are unique and there is not guarantee that causes can be identified. Most importantly, however, no immediate measures are possible if, for example, satisfaction experiences a short-term decline.

Anyone who wants to respond to patient feedback in a timely manner must quickly have the data available in an evaluated form. Modern digital solutions for measuring patient satisfaction such as opiniooon enable this. Patients have the opportunity to express their satisfaction immediately by completing the patient survey. Both hospital management and staff in the ward have real-time access to current patient satisfaction. The evaluation is automatically displayed using an intuitive dashboard. This is where, all of the data from the patient survey is illustrated in a structured manner.

In keeping with the motto, making a big impact with small changes: Digitisation is enabling the transition in small steps towards a greater focus on the patient.

This simple digital solution allows the hospital to use patient feedback to define short, medium and long-term measures to drive continuous improvements in patient satisfaction. It can then continuously improve the quality of care. opiniooon can efficiently support hospitals in initiating and successfully completing the change towards digitisation with tangible, rapid results.