SharePoint a Great Solution for Healthcare Businesses and Here’s Why
Healthcare is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the world. Believe it or not, but the global healthcare spending could go over $10 trillion (yes, you read it correctly - TRILLION) in just two years' time.
According to the official World Health Organization’s report from 2019, there are close to 750,000 healthcare companies in the US alone and they are the absolute leaders in this sector when it comes to spending (around $10,000 per capita).
For most healthcare companies, digital transformation remains the biggest challenge and the main item on their priority lists.
Most healthcare businesses are looking to revamp their organizational structures and enjoy better flexibility, but the road towards that goal is paved with lots of obstacles.
If you keep in mind all the strict safety regulations and data protection protocols of this specific sector, plus all emerging technologies that are constantly changing the IT landscape - it immediately becomes clear why digital transformation in healthcare often feels like pushing a heavy boulder up a steep hill.
But, with all the challenges in mind, healthcare leaders still believe that transforming their outdated processes will yield big results. Meticulous Research reports that the healthcare IT market is still experiencing impressive growth. According to their findings, CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) between 2019 and 2027 is well on it’s way to go above 13%, which is huge.
The Healthcare Software Landscape
Back in 2018, the global healthcare digital transformation market was estimated at $76 billion. According to ADROIT’s original research, that number has skyrocketed since then. The information we have available today gives us enough evidence to safely predict that the market will almost triple in its value by the beginning of 2025.
Even though healthcare is still largely behind when it comes to implementing digital strategies, these numbers clearly indicate that we’re entering the age of “digital acceleration”.
Healthcare software market is in full blossom and the following solutions are among the most popular for businesses:
- Electronic health record (EHR) software - similar to a CRM, used by clinics and hospitals for keeping up patient records.
- Medical database software - databases that store patients’ histories and treatment plans. Most clinics use these databases to get a deeper understanding of the diseases by cross-referencing a patient’s case with similar cases.
- Software for medical research and diagnosis - often used for ramping up new medical personnel, cross-referencing patient records, and deeply understanding diseases, outbreaks, etc.
- Electronic prescription - software for racking, renewing, and cancelling prescriptions for patients.
- Telemedicine software - software that enables doctors to book appointments with patients online.
Even though there are a ton of truly great apps out there that cover problems that fall under each of these bullet points, it’s important to bear in mind that healthcare is a truly unique industry where pre-built solutions don’t often work for all the cases.
We at Share It collaborate frequently with healthcare companies that are looking to build their own custom solution to upgrade their existing processes. One of the more interesting projects we worked so far in this industry was with PBS, an agency that provides individualized services for both adults and kids dealing with autism. We were tasked with building them an app for handling clinical sessions between the patient and the medical personnel.
In addition to building a rock-solid structure and migrating sensitive data to the new app, we needed to make sure that our solution was HIPAA compliant. The solution we built for PBS was done with the help of SharePoint. During the production processes we learned one thing - SharePoint is the PERFECT solution for healthcare businesses. Here’s a list of couple of reasons why SharePoint works so well for healthcare business:
1. Security
As you probably know if you read our above-linked use case, SharePoint is HIPAA compliant, which is a major factor for any type of business that deals with sensitive personal data. SharePoint supports checks of all the administrative, technical, and physical security boxes determined by the Security Rule safeguards.
With SharePoint, healthcare companies can run adequate risk analysis, compliance training, audit trail, while still keeping their data security in check. This is of utmost importance because data breaches can bring catastrophic consequences.
There are a minimum of two Microsoft data centers replicating ePHI, so SharePoint serves as a Disaster Recovery solution.
The platform also comes with high-level user identification and authentication, access control, data encryption, and backup features. All of this should give even the biggest of spectics a peace of mind when it comes to the health and protection of their valuable patient data and confidential business information.
2. Instant Access and Efficient Cross-Collaboration
In most cases, your medical files are forwarded from one clinic to another. In addition to viewing info by patients, clinics need to look at information through different filters as well - diseases, procedures, etc. They need to cross-reference information to make sure that they’re learning from experiences and figuring out what approach would be the best for a particular case.
Even though solutions like eClinicalWorks and Allscripts do the job for lots of clinics, it’s important to acknowledge that there are a lot of healthcare businesses out there that just aren’t comfortable with using third-party tools. For those who want to build their own system which they can control, SharePoint is one of the main solutions.
SharePoint intranets and extranets make communication and collaboration inside and outside company walls seamless. Intranets enable healthcare businesses optimize procedures and workflows. All events and work activities are easily tracked, which is especially useful for shift management and addressing emergencies.
Extranets on the other hand serve as a go-to solution for rapid exchanges of information with outside parties, like suppliers and patients.
3. Proper Documentation Management
Documentation management is a big factor for most healthcare organizations. In addition to keeping track of all the in-house documents, businesses in this industry also need to pay extra attention to structure and availability of important external info (e.g. supplier contracts).
Regardless of how trivial they may seem to someone from the outside, but day-to-day operations need to be super tight if you want to have any success in this field. We’re talking about check-ins, check-outs, accounting, medical billing, claims, patient management, inventory, etc.
Apart from providing safe flow of sensitive data, SharePoint offers great perks in the realm of contract management. With its real-time compliance checker, libraries, integrations, approval workflows, templates, and more - SharePoint helps healthcare institutions save time and optimize their processes.
4. Hiring, Onboarding, and Professional Development
Just like in many other verticals, SharePoint can be used as an awesome internal learning center for onboarding new personnel and issuing certificates that prove specific individuals are licensed to conduct specific tasks or work on specific positions / projects.
This is exactly what we built for ErgomedPLC, a pharmaceutical giant that has 3 big branches spread across 55 countries. ErgomedPLC used to waste hours and hours on going through applicants’ resumes, separating wheat from chaff through initial screening.
Since this wasn’t a sustainable process, we used SharePoint to build a solution for the company that enabled them to store and access various educational courses and employee data on the same platform. We built a system that automated a large and painful part of the ErgomedPLC hiring and certification process.
Applicants are awarded access to a library of video which they have to watch in chronological order (no skipping allowed) before advance to the test phase of the process where they’re quizzed on their knowledge. To progress to a final stage that involves an interview with a representative of ErgomedPLC, applicants need to pass the past with more than 70% accuracy.
This solution still works beautifully for our client. It does the dirty work for them and gives them access to only the best applicants that have a high probability of actually getting hiring for the position they are interviewing for.
Looking for a Custom SharePoint Solution for Your Healthcare Business? We can Help
As you can see from everything written above, SharePoint is truly the ultimate solution for healthcare businesses that are looking to digitize their operations and ensure the best level of security. It can also serve as a policy management solution, which makes it easy for your dedicated personnel to stay on top of things when it comes to policy compliance. Pretty neat, right?
Make sure to hire the best SharePoint developers to design the perfect cost-efficient solution that’s customized to the needs of your healthcare business. At Share IT, we’ve been in SharePoint development for more than a decade. More importantly, we have the necessary niche experience and all the know-how to help you out. Reach out to us today to get a time and cost estimate and discuss your project specs in more detail