By VINCE KURAITIS, GIRISH MURALIDHARAN & JODY RANCK

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Platforming Healthcare — The Long View. This essay is the next in the series entitled “Platforming Healthcare — the Long View”. The series presents a 30-Year Framework for Platforming Healthcare. An updated v2.0 of a graphic depicting this 30-Year Framework is shown below.

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Platforming Healthcare — The Long View. This essay is the next in the series entitled “Platforming Healthcare — the Long View”. The series presents a 30-Year Framework for Platforming Healthcare. An updated v2.0 of a graphic depicting this 30-Year Framework is shown above.

Today’s post will describe and discuss a potential successor to the EHR era — Unified Digital Health Platforms (UDHPs). Here’s an overview:

• Background and Environmental Trends
• Gartner’s Key Role in Characterizing the UDHP Movement
• UDHP Value Propositions
• Examples of UDHPs
  • ServiceNow

Later this week THCB will run the second section which will include analysis of the Mayo Clinic Platform.

Background and Environmental Trends

Healthcare is fragmented. Data is not standardized and has existed in silos. Patients and clinicians have disjointed experiences. Payment structures create conflicting incentives.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) were once touted as the key solution for transforming healthcare to a modern, digitally-enabled industry. Yet, they continue to frustrate clinicians with poor UI/UX and largely fulfill a primary role as a system of record to document claims submissions. 

Recent technological and business trends have begun transforming healthcare into a more unified and integrated experience: 

• HITECH (in the U.S.) drove the adoption of electronic health records across the industry 
• Standards-compliant data models and APIs across various solutions are allowing third-party integrations to add new functionality 
• Value-based care (VBC) and value-based payment (VBP) models incentivize improving quality rather than maximizing fee-for-service volumes 
• AI’s emergence and adoption in healthcare fuels the need for more – and better – data and data liquidity. 
• New competitors in healthcare (Big Tech, Big Retail, digital health ventures) compete based on improving patient experience, advancing VBC and VBP models, and integrated data and analytics 
• Accessible cloud computing infrastructure is enabling a plethora of **-as-a-Service business models 

Healthcare organizations want integrated solutions, not more point solutions. See the previous blog post in this series — “Beyond Awareness: Understanding the Magnitude of Point Solution Fatigue in Healthcare”.

Gartner’s Key Role in Characterizing the UDHP Movement

The trends and forces listed above open the door and create the need for a new category of enterprise software – Unified Digital Health Platforms (UDHPs). 

A December 2022 Gartner Market Guide report characterized the long-term potential:

The DHP shift will emerge as the most cost-effective and technically efficient way to scale new digital capabilities within and across health ecosystems and will, over time, replace the dominant era of the monolithic electronic health record (EHR).

While Gartner uses the term “Digital Health Platform (DHP), we use the term “Unified Digital Health Platform” because 1) it’s more descriptive of the architecture and its capabilities, and 2) it distinguishes UDHPs from the thousands of other digital health platforms that vary highly in function.

The DHP Reference Architecture is illustrated in a blog post by Better. Note that UDHPs are depicted as “sitting on top” of EHRs and other siloed sources of health data:

Gartner continues to update its market reports on UDHPs. An April 2024 update is entitled: “Innovation Insight: Digital Health Platforms Accelerate Transformation”. As of the date of publishing this blog post, Altera is offering a complimentary copy of Gartner’s 2024 report on UDHPs.  

This blog post is intended to focus more on the business and strategy implications of UDHPs. We strongly recommend reading Gartner’s April 2024 report on UDHPs to gain a more technical perspective.

Gartner also provides an updated (but not exhaustive) list of UDHPs:

• AWS HealthLake by Amazon Web Services
• Better Platform by Better
• DrCloud EHR by EnSoftek
• Engagement Rx by Avidon Health
• Edison Intelligence Platform by GE Healthcare
• Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine by Google
• IBM Health Insights and IBM Watson Annotator for Clinical Data by IBM
• Healthshare and Intersystems IRIS for Health by Intersystems
• Kyruus Connect by Kyruus Health
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by Microsoft
• Miya Precision by Alcidion
• Philips Healthsuite Digital Platform by Philips
• SAS Health by SAS
• ServiceNow Healthcare and Life Sciences Services Management by ServiceNow

We’ll add our own candidates to the list:

• Epic EMR by Epic
• Health Intelligence Platform by vitagroup
• Innovacer Health Cloud by Innovacer
• Nucleus for Healthcare by NTTDATA
• Oracle Health EHR by Oracle
• Salesforce Health Cloud by Salesforce
• SAP Health Data Services for FHIR by SAP
• othersTBD?

The UDHP trend is in very early stages. In its April 2024 report, Gartner estimates that the market is only 5% penetrated and that UDHP adoption will take 5 to 10 years. 

As of today, the capabilities of UDHP offerings are not uniform. In an early market, it isn’t unusual that early offerings from companies will differ. We’ll discuss some possible ramifications in the section below on “Business and Strategic Implications of UDHPs”.

It’s possible that UDHP adoption will move more quickly in countries outside the U.S. In the U.S., Epic and Cerner have a lock on health systems and are attempting to become UDHPs themselves.

In the appendix at the end of the post, we’ve provided a list of resources to explain UDHPs further.

UDHP Value Propositions

UDHPs promise a range of potential value propositions:

• Improving clinical care and unifying currently fragmented patient and clinician experiences 
• Overcoming the limitations of today’s EHRs, e.g.,
  • Standardizing data models across EHRs and digital health apps 
  • Facilitating bi-directional data flow 
  • Supplying low code/no code tools to manage workflow and processes across care teams, including patients 
  • Creating marketplaces for innovative 3rd party apps
  • Capturing new, innovative sources of data, e.g., relating to social determinants of health, patient-generated data, psychographic data, etc. 
• Offering modular, composable architectures 
• Enabling a common infrastructure to unify today’s disparate point-solution offerings 
• Providing competitive advantage. We’ll discuss this more extensively below. 

Examples of UDHPs

We’ll provide a couple of case studies to illustrate how UDHPs are being developed and deployed:

• A vendor case study of the ServiceNow UDHP
• A healthcare provider case study on UDHP deployment – the Mayo Clinic Platform

We invite other UDHP vendors to contribute a substantive guest post describing their offering and how customers deploy it. (Write to Vince vincek@bhtinfo for details.)

Case Study: ServiceNow’s Unified Digital Health Platform in Healthcare Operations

One example of a UDHP in practice is ServiceNow’s digital health platform. This case study examines its architecture, customization capabilities, and real-world applications within healthcare provider settings.

ServiceNow’s UDHP Architecture and Key Components

As shown in the diagram below, ServiceNow’s digital health platform is structured to integrate multiple healthcare workflows while ensuring compliance and security. The platform is built on a multi-layered architecture that includes:

• Data Layer: A centralized repository for structured and unstructured healthcare data, ensuring accessibility and accuracy across systems.
• Security Layer: Provides compliance frameworks and security controls to protect sensitive patient information and adhere to regulatory standards.
• Application Layer: Hosts various healthcare applications such as electronic health records (EHR), patient engagement tools, and provider workflow management.
• Infrastructure Layer: Cloud-based and on-premises solutions to support scalability, availability, and interoperability across multiple healthcare systems.

The layered approach enables healthcare organizations to integrate existing IT systems while adopting new digital health solutions.

Custom Workflow Capabilities: Enhancing Operational Efficiency

One of the key advantages of ServiceNow’s UDHP is its capability to support custom workflows tailored to the needs of healthcare providers. Custom workflows allow organizations to automate and optimize processes beyond standard out-of-the-box solutions.

Example: Custom Workflow for Clinician Onboarding

A common challenge in healthcare is the complexity of onboarding new clinicians, especially in large hospital networks. Traditional onboarding processes involve multiple departments, including HR, IT, and credentialing teams, often leading to inefficiencies.

Using ServiceNow’s workflow automation tools, a healthcare organization can create a customized onboarding process that:

• Automates Credential Verification: Integrates with third-party verification services to ensure compliance before a clinician starts practicing.
• Coordinates IT Provisioning: Automatically assigns required systems access, including EHR permissions and secure messaging platforms.
• Tracks Onboarding Progress: Provides real-time visibility to HR and department managers, reducing administrative delays.

By implementing a structured digital workflow, healthcare organizations can accelerate onboarding times, reduce administrative workload, and enhance compliance tracking.

Published Examples of ServiceNow’s UDHP in Healthcare Providers

Several healthcare organizations have deployed ServiceNow’s platform to address operational inefficiencies and improve service delivery. The following examples highlight how UDHP capabilities have been applied in different healthcare settings.

1. Novant Health: Reducing Administrative Bottlenecks

Novant Health implemented ServiceNow to streamline IT service management and automate healthcare workflows. By leveraging UDHP capabilities, the organization improved system uptime and reduced delays in patient care caused by IT-related issues. Automated workflows ensured that clinicians had immediate access to necessary systems, reducing time spent on administrative requests.

2. Sentara Healthcare: Digital Workflow Optimization

Sentara Healthcare used ServiceNow’s digital workflows to integrate various operational processes across its network of hospitals and outpatient centers. The platform enabled real-time tracking of equipment maintenance requests, staff allocation, and patient coordination, leading to increased efficiency in care delivery.

3. Elara Caring: Standardizing Processes Across Multiple Locations

Elara Caring, a home healthcare provider, faced challenges in managing patient referrals, caregiver scheduling, and compliance documentation. By adopting ServiceNow’s UDHP, Elara Caring unified these processes into a single workflow, reducing errors and improving overall patient service coordination.

Conclusion

ServiceNow’s UDHP illustrates the potential of digital platforms in optimizing healthcare workflows, improving operational efficiency, and ensuring compliance. By leveraging structured data, automation, and custom workflows, healthcare organizations can adapt the platform to their unique operational needs.

As more healthcare providers shift towards digital transformation, UDHPs will play a critical role in bridging gaps between traditional healthcare IT systems and emerging digital health innovations.

Vince Kuraitis JD/MBA is an independent consultant with over 35 years’ experience across 150+ healthcare & tech companies. He publishes The Healthcare Platform Blog, where this post first appeared. Girish Muralidharan was an SVP at GE Healthcare until April 2024 and held a variety of Executive business management roles across Imaging equipment, tech enabled services, digital platforms & solutions over the last 2 decades.Dr. Jody Ranck is a researcher with over 30 years of experience in global and domestic US health technology and covered AI, data analytics, and SDoH with Chilmark Research.