Hospital information systems are often perceived as outdated. Although public hospitals do have a technical debt, their resilience and taste for innovation are no longer in question.
Based on the experience of its more than 250 customers in the healthcare sector, our subsidiary, Blue Soft Empower , in partnership with Talan, offers an innovation pathway based on four levels of hospital information system maturity.
1. Build the infrastructure base and secure the hospital information system
The grouping of establishments into regional hospital groups (GHT) posed the challenge of converging hospital information systems in 2016. With staff having to work on several sites, IT departments have had to adapt with remote collaboration solutions. With the health crisis of 2020, forced telecommuting has become a necessity for some staff and inter-institutional collaboration has increased. But to achieve all of this, users must first be grouped in a single Azure Active Directory. Now that these identities are listed, they need to be secured, and this is where Defender for Identity comes in.
Finally, to cover all attack surfaces and detect security events, Microsoft Sentinel collects information from information systems, analyzes potential alerts and, thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, proposes appropriate measures.
2. Develop collaborative uses, both internally and externally, with patients
Sometimes operating on a GHT scale, hospital staff may have to travel throughout their department to different hospitals. It is out of the question to manage several personal mailboxes, let alone one instant messaging system per institution. Unified messaging, which is based on the unique Azure Active Directory, makes it possible to design multi-site collaborative solutions: a single secure identifier, accessible from a fixed computer, laptop or cell phone.
To extend this idea, it is appropriate to look at the care of patients. It is not only the staff who have to travel within their department (or even to an adjacent department). Patients often have to travel a lot for their care, whereas some actions can be entirely dematerialized: for example, it is possible to offer therapeutic workshops at a distance, via Microsoft Teams. The remote mode can thus promote patient involvement in their care and attract patients who, without remote access, would not have been able to continue their follow-up effectively.
3. Dematerialize business processes to gain flexibility
To continue the road to the hospital of tomorrow, an essential step is the dematerialization of business processes. Gone are the days of paper forms and handwritten data entry. Microsoft's Power Platform solutions enable the creation of internal applications and dedicated external portals. Manage patient pre-admissions, hospitalization scheduling, inventory management, equipment requests or even on-call schedules, everything can be done digitally. The result is significant time savings, thanks to fast and efficient information feedback, coupled with savings in travel and email correspondence.
4. Go even further and anticipate needs with artificial intelligence
Finally, in this journey towards the hospital of tomorrow, it goes without saying that AI occupies an important place. With its potential that goes far beyond human capacities, artificial intelligence, applied to the health sector, could make it possible to anticipate the equipment needs of departments or even help healthcare teams diagnose and prognose patients thanks to the analysis and cross-referencing of information. Backed by the tools of cloud Azure, artificial intelligence is the data analysis tool that will enable hospitals to stay one step ahead of the needs of staff and patients.
All these changes must, of course, be supported by user guidance to ensure that the new tools are used as effectively as possible.
While the road to the hospital of tomorrow may seem long, it is in fact already well underway in many GHTs. As a matter of efficiency and adaptability, the health sector is equipping itself with new technologies that allow it to modernize as needed, in order to provide optimal quality service.
