The Journal of mHealth Vol 3 Issue 1 (Feb/Mar 2016) | Page 9

7 Digital Trends for Healthcare in 2016
ments, and so on. Because unstructured data is not easily aggregated or understood by most analytics systems and tools, many
provider organisations are missing valuable insights on their
patient populations that could help them deliver more timely
interventions and better outcomes.

7 Digital Trends
for Healthcare
2016

For example, a recent study published in the Canadian Medical
Association Journal examined more than 11.5 million patient
records and found that 38 per cent of diabetic patients in that
population were not explicitly coded for diabetes in their patient
records. The diagnosis of diabetes was indicated only by the
presence of diabetes medications and abnormal blood glucose
levels in the unstructured physician notes, medication lists, etc.
As expected, those patients with a coded diagnosis of diabetes
in their charts were found to have a significantly higher level of
care quality than those with un-coded diabetes.
Providers like Talix are using their proprietary technology to
enable healthcare organisations to deeply mine both structured
and unstructured patient data in electronic medical records
(EMRs) to uncover valuable patient information for a more
comprehensive view of the patient. The Talix HealthData
Engine combines a comprehensive medical taxonomy, advanced
clinical natural language processing (NLP) technology, and a
sophisticated coding and clinical rules database which helps providers, payers and accountable care organissations improve coding efficiency, optimise patient risk scoring and accurately realise
reimbursements by uncovering missed or inaccurate codes in
structured and unstructured patient data.

4

Mobile First

One big move that we will see in 2016 is the introduction of mobile first solutions. In the past digital
health solutions and digital healthcare services have
been predominantly designed to focus initially on
web-delivery, with mobile functions and integration coming as
a secondary aspect to the design and business strategy. What we
are beginning to see is a significant shift in this focus, towards
putting mobile at the heart of the strategy when it comes to
designing digitally-enabled services. This is a positive step particularly as in many regions of the world access to a smartphone
is considerable higher than access to a computer.

5

Cybersecurity
2015 gained the ominous title as the year of the
‘health hack’ with many major healthcare providers,
payers and health insurers experiencing major system intrusions and data losses.

According to Stephanie Preston, Cyber Embedded Systems
Engineer, at Battelle one of the biggest threats to healthcare
systems comes from the type of malware that can affect any
standard PC or laptop. The intention of such malware is usually
to enslave a particular device making it part of a larger botnet,
however, in the case of medical devices or hospital solutions
the end result often simply renders the system inoperable and in
need of complete reformatting.
Continued on page 8

The Journal of mHealth

7