You've likely heard it before: every business is a digital business. That saying is increasingly true; however, some businesses and sectors digitize more quickly than others. Healthcare has traditionally been on the slower side of digital transformation and technology adoption, but that's changing.
A vast majority (81%) of worldwide healthcare executives say digital transformation is accelerating within their organizations, according to Accenture's Digital Health Technology Vision report. And 93% say they're innovating with urgency.
Even as a regular consumer, healthcare's digital transformation isn't hard to see. Readily available telehealth platforms connect patients and providers for more convenient and accessible healthcare services. And some caregivers use innovations like wearable devices to track patient health from afar.
Technology is also working behind the scenes to modernize healthcare organizations. Smart technologies can help this data-heavy industry modernize its internal systems, providing fast, accurate information on things like the number of available beds, patient status and supply inventory. Artificial intelligence (AI) can also do the heavy lifting typically involved in mundane administrative processes like paying bills, maintaining patient databases and scheduling appointments.
Many digital-first healthcare organizations are finding a new challenge as they embrace technology: businesses must guarantee seamless digital experiences. In other words, they must keep their apps and services always on and performing well.
Too often, there is so much attention on buying or developing apps and services that sustaining these innovations is overlooked. But system downtime can be costly for any business and particularly harmful for those in the healthcare industry.
As healthcare organizations roll out innovations at increasing velocity, they must build a long-term strategy for how they will maintain the uptime of their critical apps and services. And there's only one tool that can ensure this continuous availability in our modern IT ecosystems. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) can help IT Operations teams ensure the uptime of critical apps and services.
How AIOps Helps Healthcare Systems
There's a common misconception: someone flips the technology "on" switch, and apps and services stay online and operate at peak performance. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.
Human IT Operations teams must operationalize healthcare technologies and then maintain them to provide reliable systems for patients, providers and other employees. After all, the systems, applications and networks behind the technologies that make our lives easier tend to be complex.
Maintaining uptime in these complex environments rides on monitoring and catching service-disrupting incidents before they impact the user. But humans can no longer perform this monitoring and detection alone because there is simply too much data for humans to process. Our modern systems prove too layered, interdependent and ephemeral. On top of this complexity, modern systems also spit out so much data that it's virtually impossible for human operators to handle, no matter how big the IT team.
The cadence of technology deployments and updates also makes uptime assurances more challenging. The very changes to the production environment that provide bigger and better technologies can also spark the service interruptions that lead to outages.
In short, the IT Operations teams charged with maintaining our modern IT ecosystems need help. And that's where AIOps comes in.
AIOps helps IT Operations teams simplify the management of ever complex and evolving IT systems. Through big data, automation and machine learning, a holistic AIOps solution detects potential service-disrupting incidents, identifies the problem and provides teams with the actionable insights they need to fix the problem — and keep it from happening again. If implemented correctly, these tools also automate the entire incident workflow to enable rapid responses that can catch issues early, before they impact the business.
Preventing outages is essential, but AIOps tools provide another advantage. With time added back into their days, engineering teams can focus on developing the kind of innovations that deliver tangible business value.