15.02.2021 • Press Release

The digitalisation of healthcare

From the value of data to the importance of telemedicine to innovate how we treat, care and prevent: Engineering's vision

To design a new form of healthcare, we need to promote the evolution of opportunities for treatment, care, and prevention. The white paper "E-Health" explores the challenges and opportunities facing the healthcare sector: Engineering's vision explains how Digital Transformation can create digital ecosystems with the citizen/patient at their centre.

The OECD Health at a Glance report highlighted an average public and private health expenditure in Western countries that is equivalent to 8.8% of GDP, with a forecast growth of 10.2% in 2030, mainly due to the progressive ageing of the population and the related incidence of chronic diseases, which are estimated to absorb 70-80% on world resources allocated to health purposes. The historic event of the Covid-19 pandemic will have long-term economic impacts on healthcare expenditure and will shift the emphasis onto aspects such as prevention, planning/organisation, speed and collaboration. All of this makes unavoidable a rapid and profound rethinking of the strategies, models and tools of the Health System in all countries and at all levels of healthcare, with Digital Transformation set to play a central and strategic role.

"The Digital Transformation of healthcare will need to be complete, specialised, and capable of merging with the other digital ecosystems that surround the lives of citizens" explains Dario Buttitta, General Manager of Public Administration and Health at Engineering. "Only in this way will it be possible to concretely expand the value of data, which can be directly grafted onto processes in order to guide actions and strategies that are increasingly oriented towards caring as well as curing.

In the White Paper "E-Health" experts from the Engineering Group explain how every change in healthcare will have to support increasingly information-intensive and real-time models and processes. This will allow for the creation of digital ecosystems that are centred on the person, governed by data, and capable of putting all the resources available to the Health Systems into a system. The strategic edge and centrality of the digital world are recognised by all clinical, decision-making and institutional professionals in healthcare, and only through the use of enabling technologies will it be possible to make fast and high-quality decisions to simplify access to services, develop diagnostic and cure capacities, and ensure continuity of care and the capacity for prevention, partly through Telemedicine.

The possible fields of innovation for enabling technologies see the Engineering Group engaged in projects for over 150 customers (such as local health authorities, hospital companies, university polyclinics, and research institutes), where AI & Advanced Analytics are used for clinical decisions, bio-surveillance and health governance, Telemedicine for remote care and treatment, the Internet of Things for clinical data acquisition, cybersecurity for the protection and use of personal data, and risk management tools for the minimisation of clinical and biological risks. The two in-house platforms, AREAS and ellipse, respond to the digital demand for predefined application solutions that are vertically developed on processes ranging from clinical and diagnostics to administration and accounting.

The White Paper "E-Health" is part of an editorial series produced by Engineering Group to report on the most important market-related and technological trends in Digital Transformation.

To download the White Paper “E-Health”: https://www.eng.it/white-papers/e-health

 To download all the white papers published: https://www.eng.it/insights-news/