Smart technologies are breaking down barriers
The first big trend is disruptive technologies and the disruption it is causing in business models. There is also a change in behaviour in radiology departments.
There is a lot of talk about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming in, how clinicians are adopting it, and how is it going to disrupt clinical work. These are currently at a nascent stage but hold a lot of promise.
AI is not going to replace radiologists, but it is going to significantly complement and supplement the radiologist’s capability. In fact, AI has the capability to analyse the image before it goes to the radiologist, allowing them to pick up an image that has been flagged off by AI rather than browsing through thousands of images.
This will help in triaging and reaching out to patients who need urgent care and improves clinical outcomes for the entire hospital. Moreover, This is how a healthcare system based on value-based reimbursement models would work.
Previously, hospital departments would not talk about data. It is only now as vendors have started offering data analytics solutions, hospitals are keenly looking into how data can help increase operational efficiencies within departments.
They are also looking at finding out how and where waste is happening, what can be done to prevent it, and how more can be achieved with fewer resources. In the post-pandemic world, most hospitals are going to work on minimal resources, but are going to expect more outcomes than what was seen before the pandemic.
Cloud gained significance during the pandemic as it was quicker to deploy and didn't need in-house resources to prepare. During the pandemic, offices were shut down and staffing resources were laid off, and the cloud became a better model to deploy as it was being done off-site and didn’t consume in-house resources’ time.
Going forward, there will only be higher cloud adoption. Previously, operators were on the fence about the cloud and were looking at hybrid models – storing the most sensitive data in the data centres in-house and only moving the secondary workloads to the cloud.
But the pandemic has shown that it's possible to move the entire primary workload to the cloud. Many vendors have also started talking about the cloud as being a key value proposition of their offerings.
Most hospitals are in financial distress due to the pandemic as they have had to delay elective procedures, which are the top profit-making procedures. This has reduced their spending capability and budgets, which will impact medical imaging procurement.
However, the industry has pivoted and have started offering the “Opex” or enterprise business model. In this model, the hospital doesn’t need to buy the equipment from its capital expenditure budgets, so they would pay as they use. This would involve once in a year or a five-year payment plan through fixed monthly or yearly instalments. This would give hospitals clear visibility as to what expenditure is coming their way and how much they have to spend on imaging services. This is a model that will continue to gain traction moving forward.
In the past, radiologists were confined to their dark rooms where they would read and interpret images. Today, they have come out of their reading rooms and interact more frequently with the referring physicians and are becoming proactive in reaching out to patients. Increased collaboration is bound to improve clinical outcomes. This behavioural change is happening as part of patient-centric care. Within radiology too, everything is being centred around the patient. Several solutions are available to address this such as enabling patients to access the images and sending images outside a network. AI is increasingly being used in clinical support and helps radiologists in various ways, one being triaging. Today, radiologists are ready to play a key role in patient care and can ensure that the patient gets the right treatment at the right time.