By Kim Waiyaboon
If you are hearing the terms healthcare information technology or healthcare IT consultant with increasing frequency, you’re not alone. The use of information technology in the healthcare sector is growing quickly, as with nearly every industry. By 2026, healthcare IT is expected to reach a compound annual growth of nearly 12.5 percent from 2021. At the same time, revenues should more than double, from $95 billion to $192.64 billion, according to Mordor Intelligence.
Essentially, healthcare IT refers to the technological tools used by medical professionals, health insurance companies, and patients to gather, store, share, and analyze health information. A healthcare IT consultant helps healthcare organizations implement paperless business models and navigate the changing healthcare industry.
In this article, we’ll describe how the internet and digitalization are changing patient care. Along the way, we’ll emphasize the role of the healthcare IT consultant in this evolution.
What is a healthcare IT consultant?
A healthcare consultant, generally speaking, will help healthcare providers and organizations overcome technological challenges to implementing digital health software and hardware. The IT solutions then allow the organization to improve patient care.
Healthcare consulting services vary from one business to the next. Many offer a wide variety of services including strategic consulting, cybersecurity and cloud computing, technology implementation, HR and people management tech, legal and regulatory assistance, and marketing, revenue and reimbursement assistance.
Along with the boom in healthcare IT implementation, healthcare consulting is set to rapidly increase over the next several years. In 2020, the healthcare consulting services market size was valued at $11.1 billion. It’s projected to more than double by 2028 and reach a value of $23.8 billion.
Healthcare organizations badly need expertise and advice to keep up with rapidly-developing digital practices.
As such, healthcare consultants work with healthcare groups, including hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, research institutes, healthcare insurance providers, federal healthcare agencies, medical device manufacturers, digital health startups, and many types of providers.
Healthcare IT consultants can fulfill various roles or help the people in those roles, depending on the client's unique needs.
We’ll discuss some case studies below. But to give general examples, a consultant can aid in research and development by collaborating with researchers to establish clinical trial or device designs, research investments, regulatory interactions and more. A consultant could assist with business development by helping an organization navigate commercial opportunities. Consultants can take on an organization's commercial needs and help develop marketing plans using market research and sales data. They also can support medical affairs teams with development of their scientific narratives, publication plans and communication strategies.
What does success look like for a healthcare IT consultant?
A success story is the ultimate indicator of job satisfaction. Let’s look at some specific cases where a consulting company’s efforts benefitted its customer’s organization.
Security for government health agencies
SDV International, for example, supports U.S. Navy hospitals and medical clinics in the U.S. and abroad. The health IT consulting firm helps with medical record coding, auditing, and training services, and other technology-enabled services.
The company also employs experts on cloud computing. So, when the Department of Veterans Affairs in St. Louis needed new, department-wide security upgrades, it called SDV International. The company's security team completed security control selections and ATO packages for the VA, hosted in the FedRAMP Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Developing electronic solutions
When an Ontario emergency department’s nurses received new patients, they needed a way to efficiently observe and evaluate those patients and share that information. They also had to accurately score their vital signs and symptoms using the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS).
Ontario Health enlisted health consulting firm Accenture to help develop a solution using input from nurse practitioners and emergency staff. After collecting that data, an algorithm was developed and tested to allow nurses to triage patients by type and severity of systems. The system issues a score to each patient that makes sure the worst cases receive care first. Additionally, the system constantly reassessed a patient’s need for care as symptoms changed or developed. The result helped ER staff to deliver the best possible health outcomes for their patients.
Tailoring user training
Chicago’s Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is a global leader in physical medicine and rehabilitative care. It’s also the world’s first-ever “translational” research hospital, meaning clinicians, scientists, technologists and innovators collaborate to develop and apply research in real time. As the organization prepared to move to a new location, its staff needed to be trained on a new IT platform to provide seamless patient care.
The AbilityLab partnered with the Burwood Group to create a new user training interface, the Integrated Caregiver Experience (ICE) training program. The Burwood team was able to deliver the successful training product after integrating information from training materials provided by product vendors into one program. Burwood consultants worked with staff to determine how the platforms would affect daily workflows so they could develop a smooth learning experience.
Business intelligence implementation
SDV International was contracted by a Fortune 100 company to rewrite and update their software that helps millions of healthcare centers and retirement homes process patient data and medication. SDV International modernized the firm’s data warehouse capability to enable ERP driven-dashboards to instantly report and monitor trends in prescriptions and lab work through Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp.
Because of SDV International’s work, the customer is able to improve its data management and easily create and access reports on things like missed medications, hospital readmissions, employee performance, community marketing activity, and medication classifications.
Developing automation software for drug manufacturing
A pharmaceutical company that provides caregivers and patients with oncology, renal and transfusion products needed a more centralized solution to cover short-living chemotherapy drugs and TPN production, stock control, client information and direct sales data. The organization would implement the solution, and so would its medical customer’s facilities. The pharmaceutical company was looking to replace an outdate system with a new one that could easily be updated.
Working with ScienceSoft, the pharmaceutical company chose a .net platform for its new integrated system. Clients can interact with it to perform data maintenance. Plus, the company uses it as a production module covering the full process of medicine manufacturing from drug order and recipe entry to release and delivery, stock control, invoicing reporting, security and more.
As a result of ScienceSoft’s solution, the pharmaceutical company was able to provide and offer better chronic disease management. The company, hospitals, and other medical providers and organizations can request medicines with ease.
Implementing cybersecurity programs
After conducting an internal audit, one of the world’s oldest pharmaceutical and medical device companies recognized potential gaps in security practices that exposed their medical devices and, potentially, patient information. The European company knew it needed immediate help to prevent cybersecurity threats. It enlisted the SDV International to develop a cross-departmental security risk management program to protect their medical devices and patient information.
SDV International consultants conducted a risk assessment to evaluate the medical device vulnerabilities and identified gaps that might be considered at risk of a security breach by future US Government customers. Utilizing NIST industry-standards to allow device manufacturers to provide security information to providers, SDV International’s team hardened the device to accommodate federal cybersecurity compliance requirements.
Ultimately, SDV International developed a security solution that allows the health system to protect its devices and data, detect and quickly respond to incidents, and recover operations.
Establishing and improving virtual care practices
When COVID-19 struck, virtual doctor visits became the new norm. One national telehealth provider saw a 1,000 percent increase in virtual visit demand across its systems. The influx maxed out its platforms and provider network. To care for patients in need, the company had to quickly update its practices and expand.
Consulting firm Accenture put a team of 25 consultants to work, rapidly upscaling the organization’s platform to meet demand. The team focused on diagnostics, architecture support, and provider onboarding, which brought doctors onto the platform 86 percent faster.
In two months, the telehealth provider was reaching the number of patients it previously expected to reach in five years. Efficiencies tailored by the consultants allowed the system to onboard thousands of doctors a week and meet patient demand.
Where to look for help
The use of healthcare IT is showing no signs of slowing. Healthcare consultants and consulting firms are making the transition easier for providers and organizations everywhere. SDV International can help you navigate the ever-changing landscape and find solutions for your organization.