The big appeal of Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is that it offers organizations unprecedented control over their contact estates. Whatever the application; whatever the integration environment; whatever the market vertical; CPaaS flexes to meet the challenge. CPaaS’s flexibility shines brightest in sectors with highly specialized needs, of which one of the most sensitive is healthcare.
In a fast-moving world, CPaaS solutions give healthcare providers the flexibility they need to drive life-saving care. In this article, we examine three key areas in which CPaaS can benefit healthcare, analyze what the future of healthcare CPaaS might look like, and see what other sectors can learn from the experiences of healthcare providers.
1. CPaaS Healthcare Integrations
Healthcare is defined by its specialized systems, ranging from Electronic Patient Records to Hospital at Home Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The reasons for healthcare’s Galapagos-like specialization are many, but running throughout is the fact that technology providers in healthcare are held to far higher standards than others. With so much caution, regulation, and attention to detail, developing new solutions for healthcare is a persistent challenge.
All this might seem like a tiresome barrier to entry for would-be CPaaS providers, but in reality, it’s the very opposite. CPaaS’s flexibility make it especially well suited to meeting healthcare’s high standards.
- Firstly, any CPaaS solution has to meet prevailing requirements for data security compliance, to ensure that sensitive medical data is kept securely private. A cloud hosted in-country is an essential first step.
- From there, any CPaaS solution must be able to integrate via APIs into hospital Electronic Patient Records and other discrete systems of record, such as those used in primary care, community health and mental health – this is CPaaS’s strongest offering to healthcare providers. The ability to orchestrate data flows across multiple systems of record whilst delivering mission-critical patient-facing communications lies at the heart of CPaaS’s value to healthcare providers.
- From here, CPaaS becomes the hub for the organization’s data management. Healthcare practitioners, contact center agents and patients alike can all access and update data from any location at any time, making inter-working infinitely more efficient between multiple systems of record that otherwise don’t talk to one another.
For healthcare providers, the CPaaS solution delivers a crucial data aggregation layer, bringing data from multiple different sources into a single location, format, and access point, whilst preserving the integrity of, and controlling access to, the organization’s multiple and sensitive systems of record. IT professionals at the provider are freed from implementing and maintaining multiple fragile integrations or introducing clunky and expensive Robotic Process Automation, whilst healthcare practitioners focus on saving lives, not struggling to locate and update patient information stored in multiple locations and formats. And that’s before we even start considering the need for clean and reliable data to power new AI developments.
2. Emergency Communications Made Easy
When lives are at stake, speed is everything. Healthcare providers need to understand their patients’ needs quickly; their symptoms, their location, and next steps. CPaaS streamlines communications, speeding up life-saving interactions and delivering the highest quality of care as quickly as possible.
- CPaaS offers a single, unified interface – All communications, both internal and external, are brought into a single, cloud-based location. This interface can be securely accessed from any device by any member of the organization, with access rights restricted according to security status and role.
- CPaaS solutions provide a range of tools for speeding up interactions – Whether that’s automating simple or repetitive inquiries, accelerating interactions by equipping agents with patient data or implementing more effective and resilient contact routing across multiple channels of engagement. Patients aren’t forced to wait in queues and instead can access life-saving care quickly and reliably.
- CPaaS speeds up data-management tasks – entering and updating data manually takes time; time that doctors and nurses don’t have. By providing a single point of access, and even automating some data entry tasks through AI and IoT devices, CPaaS gives time back to the experts.
CPaaS helps healthcare providers move fast. And speed is only going to become more crucial in the future as demands increase and healthcare professionals become more scarce – with the USA alone forecasting a shortfall of 200,000 clinicians next year.
3. Hospital at Home
With CPaaS, healthcare organizations position themselves as future-facing. With a flexible, scalable communications platform, new technologies and channels of communication can be quickly and easily deployed. And perhaps the most important of these new technologies is Hospital at Home, sometimes called the Virtual Ward.
- Today, hospitals face an acute challenge; too few beds for too many patients. The answer is obvious; have the patients stay at home, where they all have a bed of their own and can recover faster, sleeping better, safe from cross-infection. But how do hospitals deliver quality, responsive care remotely? CPaaS offers a solution – Hospital at Home.
- A Hospital at Home solution leverages IoT devices – These are internet-enabled medical devices that send data to the CPaaS data hub, which in turn overlays and updates hospital systems of record, and which automatically alerts appropriate staff resources in the event of a sudden change in a patient’s condition.
- CPaaS makes effective remote care a reality, treating patients from the comfort of their own homes and saving space in hospitals for the most urgent cases.
- Hospital at Home furthermore delivers major cost advantages to healthcare providers, compared with in-patient treatment. It is predicted that up to 30% of hospital-type care will soon be delivered in the home.
With CPaaS, healthcare’s horizons are expanding month by month.
Learning the lessons of healthcare CPaaS
Healthcare proves that even for the most sensitive, caution-oriented sectors, CPaaS has much to offer. Its flexibility, scalability, and customizability mean that CPaaS solutions can adapt to any challenge, integrate with any third-party solution, and deliver a future-facing strategy for technological adoption.
As a leading CPaaS provider in healthcare, Content Guru is transforming the development of connected health and care communications. Through integrating IoT, voice, text, video, chat, social media, and AI technologies, care providers and their patients will be better connected, enabling them to deliver tomorrow’s healthcare requirements safely, autonomously and cost-effectively.
Content Guru’s cloud communications solution, storm, is field-proven and supports:
- Control and coordination of patient flows at clinical pathway, place, health system, and national levels.
- Development of personalized pathways of care ranging from urgent & emergency care to mental health, acute, primary and social care. Different patients have different needs, and the most vulnerable should be identified and prioritized as and when they get in contact. Repeat users also need to be identified, particularly when an emergency is ongoing.
- Service innovation through a combination of user engagement, advanced communication technologies and agile developments. Healthcare providers are under unprecedented pressure to do more with less. Technology that allows them to utilize their scarce resources more efficiently is becoming increasingly important.
Healthcare holds CPaaS to high standards; standards every sector can learn from.
Martin Taylor
Martin Taylor is the Co-founder and Deputy CEO of Redwood Technologies Group, a leading cloud communications tech provider with Content Guru and Redwood global operating entities. Innovator of significant IP and award-winning 'storm' cloud services for public and private-sector. Member, CBI Tech Council;.
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