New market forces are presenting an opportunity to drive out long-standing healthcare complexities and costs that historically have stymied innovation. The barriers that have prevented efficient data sharing and analysis are disappearing, while disaggregation of care, value-based initiatives and emerging technologies are reshaping how healthcare consumers are engaging with pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, healthcare providers and payers.

Enabling connected experiences and AI-driven insights derived from the increased volume and velocity of data will require foundational platforms that provide a secure compliant environment for health information exchange as well as flexibility in orchestrating this data to serve patient health experiences across diverse populations, therapeutic areas, and acute care needs. Building these platforms in the cloud can eliminate the data silos that currently exist across an organization’s IT landscape and accelerate development of applications by reducing the time to engineer, verify, and validate solutions with pre-existing reusable data and service components. Additionally, using core environments with open, standards-based APIs, business logic and workflows, organizations can assemble best-of-breed applications and tools to create experiences specific to their member and population health needs.

When selecting and designing their technology approaches, organizations should ensure their solution address these considerations:

•        Human from Start to Finish – Leveraging design thinking and rapid feedback loops. Build capabilities to detect anomalies, trends, and opportunities to improve effectiveness.
•        Driven by Evidence – Valid clinical association, accuracy, and sound QMS practices. Safety by design with capabilities to proactively respond to needs.
•        Agility as a Virtue – Agile and DevOps methods supporting continuous development and integration. Includes a "culture shock" to align talent and ways of working to institutionalize innovation.

Organizations that embrace cloud-based, open core technologies will be well positioned to maximize the power of the emerging digital health ecosystem to deliver the end-to-end, connected health experience consumers expect.