Revolutionising Healthcare in the Asia Pacific through digital transformation

With common challenges of ageing populations, shortages of healthcare staff and consumer demand for better quality of service, there can be no doubt that the digital transformation of healthcare is top of mind for governments and healthcare providers across the Asia Pacific region. For example, in Australia the Australian Digital Health Agency aims to improve health outcomes for Australians in remote areas through the delivery of national digital health services and systems. In Singapore, the government has prioritised ‘smart health’ initiatives to meet the challenges of an ageing population and lower birth rates. 

For healthcare consumers, people want more choice, transparency, and control when it comes to healthcare services. Access to services and the ability to complete processes on mobile devices, and knowledge that their information is protected and secured against cyberattacks is paramount. From a healthcare provider perspective, there is a need for secure, instant access to information in the face of increased patient volumes and staff shortages. They also want to reduce time spent on administrative tasks so they can spend more time with patients.

The paper problem inhibiting productivity

A major issue that many healthcare providers face is the number of paper-based manual processes that are in place across the patient lifecycle, not to mention internal operations, such as staff recruitment and onboarding. These can be significant blockers for digital transformation.  Consider patient intake, which is often inefficient, causes delays in providing services and delivers a poor patient experience. 

By digitising the intake process patients receive an email or SMS notification to complete simple guided forms anywhere, anytime and on any device. Error rates and rework can be dramatically reduced with data validation and completion times are faster through integration with Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. 

Some of the key benefits of digitisation include:

• Healthcare providers are immediately meeting or exceeding the expectations of today’s healthcare consumers by providing a digital experience

• Healthcare professionals have instant access to accurate, legible information to ensure faster provision of the correct services to the patient; critical when dealing with senior citizens and high priority cases

• Staff spend more time with patients and less time manually entering data into EHR systems

• Patient data is securely encrypted and managed to ensure compliance with increasingly stringent security and data privacy requirements

• Costs are reduced with less administrative effort, manual data entry and rework

Some key Docusign capabilities that can be leveraged for this solution include SMS delivery of notifications, identity verification of the patient and guided web forms which can be completed on either a provider supplied device or the patient’s mobile phone.

Many other processes across the healthcare value chain, whether patient-facing or back office, can gain similar benefits by removing paper. Digitising HR staff onboarding or offboarding, patient Consent forms, supplier contracts, and care plan instructions benefit patients by providing faster access to services and increased quality of care. 

For example in Australia, the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service (CHHHS) has digitised their finance and accounting workflows with Docusign. By creating digital versions of their paper documents, they have reduced costs from printing and scanning documents by an estimated $60,000 per year, and reduced time to complete key documents from 15 minutes to 3 minutes. A whopping 500% increase in efficiency. As often happens with organisations implementing Docusign, other parts of the CHHHS such as HR have seen this success and are now realising similar benefits by automating manual processes.

By digitising paper-based processes with Docusign, private and public sector healthcare providers can accelerate their digital transformation strategies to simplify patient engagement and back office processes, improve the quality of care and save time in staff recruitment and onboarding.

To learn more about how Docusign can help healthcare organisations automate manual processes watch our on-demand webinar or contact our sales team.