Today’s businesses must establish diverse and integrated technology and software to ensure smooth and efficient operations. Healthcare providers typically rely on a suite of software tools and applications to meet their business and operational needs. 

Whether you are an administrator or manager for dermatology, urology, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, orthopedic or other practices, you have likely come across the idea of technology or healthcare tech stacks and wondered how they can assist with your healthcare modernization.

The idea of collating a healthcare tech stack is to identify your practice needs, including those of individual departments, to establish a healthcare data infrastructure incorporating existing and new technology and applications. The goal is to form a cohesive system that enables efficiency, accuracy and improved user experience. When building your tech stack, consider your current procedures, long-term goals, needs and industry best practices. 

How to Strategically Build a Healthcare Tech Stack

Start by determining the current state of your technological foundation. You want your core system to allow easy integration for current and future technologies. Although your systems might be cutting-edge now, they can become outdated quickly.

Guide to Healthcare Stack Modernization

The first step to building a healthcare tech stack is to consider what you already have so you can assess what’s working and what’s lacking. Are you aiming to improve patient care, streamline your operations or become more profitable? How about all of the above? Here’s what you need to know before you build a tech stack for your workflow.

1. Determine Your Tech Stack Foundation 

In any tech stack, the foundation is paramount as it ensures the effectiveness and usability of the base layer and integrated auxiliary components. Healthcare providers can choose between an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR) system. Each has different offerings, and you’ll need to decide based on the type of practice and your unique needs. You will want to consider three primary aspects of EHR and EMR systems:

• The importance of EHR and EMR systems: These are essential digital tools for healthcare companies. However, you’ll want to examine the aspects of available systems that are the most relevant and important to your practice.
• The appropriate EHR or EMR system: Just like other healthcare tech stack components, you need to consider selecting the best system that offers the ideal features and functionality for your specific needs.
• The integration capabilities: Considering your existing system, you may find that it can easily integrate with additional tools and applications that streamline non-clinical areas. If not, you may require a more adaptable system. 

2. Consider Business and Patient Needs

Adopting modern technology is critical to staying abreast of changes in medical practices. Before doing so, you will want to identify your business needs and areas requiring improvement, which could be:

• Ensuring proper tech and information regulation compliance.
• Streamlining administrative tasks and processes.
• Aligning with current needs but planning for future possibilities.
• Simplifying patient data management.
• Optimizing patient engagement.
• Enhancing and personalizing patient payment portal interactions.
• Improving the patient experience and satisfaction through tech and other ways.
• Promoting an overall patient-centric approach instead of system-centric. 

The patient experience is the most crucial component to remember while building the stack to ensure you only add the relevant elements. Screen different tech and service offerings, as some providers will better understand your nuanced industry needs.

3. Build a Logical and Cohesive Healthcare Tech Stack

A cohesive healthcare tech stack ensures your organization can accomplish individual tasks in an integrated and connected way. Whether a staff member is in patient care, administration, marketing, or maintenance, cohesive healthcare data infrastructure helps them efficiently achieve their goals without unnecessary steps — all in a collaborative way that allows easy information sharing, processing and retrieval. 

When you compile your tech stack, consider future technological changes and advancements and realize what is outdated and what elements remain fundamental. You’ll want a system incorporating carefully selected technical components that promote efficiency, patient experience, accelerated revenue cycle management (RCM) and return on investment (ROI). It would be best if you focused on:

• Future-proof technologies offering integration and interoperability: You’ll want to invest in those that solve current problems, are agile, scalable and offer easy integration. Consider how communication, billing and the patient payment portal might change over time.
• Innovation in tandem with usability and experience: Staff and patients should find the new and innovative healthcare tech stack easy to use. Its effectiveness and efficiency should create a pleasant user experience.
• Data security and privacy compliance: Patient privacy and data security are crucial considerations. You want a system that offers rapid uptake and implementation, but it must provide the surety that employees and patients can trust the new systems and applications. Additionally, you must ensure you fully comply with all privacy laws and regulations. 
• Vendors offering comprehensive solutions: To fulfill your non-clinical practice tasks, look for a reliable provider offering integrated solutions that satisfy multiple needs and functions in your healthcare tech stack. Look for components that promote efficiency, staff and patient satisfaction, operational and revenue cycle streamlining and enhanced patient journey.

Finding a Collaborative Infrastructure

You can add various healthcare data infrastructure solutions and elements to your tech stack. With so many options at your disposal, finding the tools that enable collaboration, ease of use, increased revenue, time-saving, minimal training, integration with current systems and improved patient journey is essential. When deciding which elements to add, consider: 

• The providers’ expertise. 
• Their security and compliance. 
• The service and tech support offered.
• Their understanding of the medical industry needs.
• The technology or software features and limitations. 

It is best to identify multi-function technology because you want to streamline the tech stack and reduce the need for multiple solutions, which can ultimately cause confusion and increased expenses. Additionally, even though certain technologies may be trending, there could be better solutions for your needs. All companies have differing requirements, and it is wiser to tailor your tech stack than to try and model your stack after another. 

Consider outlining your business and system needs before you scout for healthcare tech stack elements. Look at where you can improve and decide on your short-term and long-term goals, which could be any of the following and more: 

• Improve data integration.
• Safer data storage.
• Update data retrieval and analysis.
• Improved user interface.
• Adjustments to data usage.
• Implement cost reduction measures.
• Desire improved patient experience.
• Need greater automation and streamlining.

Seamless Integration With Existing Structures

You likely already have a healthcare data infrastructure. However, some areas offer improvement opportunities. These areas for growth and adaptation may be in the front-end or back-end of the systems you use to manage and operate your daily business. When updating your healthcare data infrastructure, there are likely aspects that require an IT development team to ensure proper integration and compatibility. These include current and added:

• Operating systems.
• Programming languages.
• Databases and database management systems.
• Servers, whether onsite or cloud-based storage and integration.

Part of healthcare modernization is adapting your tech stack to improve all non-clinical tasks so that your medical staff can focus on clinical work and offer the best possible patient care. You can focus on a range of areas and processes, such as:

• Patient payment portals.
• Patient management.
• Information analytics.
• EHR and EMR management.
• Medical billing and claims. 
• Patient payment technology. 

To effectively integrate new technology into your existing healthcare tech stack, it is essential to follow a systematic approach and only make inclusions or changes once ready. To ensure a seamless integration: 

1. Involve all relevant stakeholders in the decision process. 
2. Outline your existing systems and tools.
3. Decide your goals and expected return on investment (ROI).
4. Discover what you need to enhance your existing structures. 
5. Acquire the new tools and run a trial phase.
6. Gain feedback from stakeholders and evaluate outcomes.
7. Adjust where needed and monitor improvements.

Healthcare Modernization

As healthcare continues to evolve and modernize, it is important to keep the patient at the center as they are the primary focus of medicine. Countless technologies with medical applications can help make processes simpler for medical staff and offer unified patient solutions.

Enhance Your EHR With an Integrated Patient Payment Portal

Healthcare services still rely heavily on their EHR systems to complete many tasks. However, EHRs offer constrained collaboration as they were initially intended to improve business and administrative functions by digitizing medical paperwork. Though these systems have their place for greater collaboration and improved workflows, managers need to find ways to modernize and improve their healthcare technology stack. 

EHR systems are crucial, but they can bring on many challenges, including poor patient usability, and often lack many advanced features for non-clinical processes. The best solution to ensure minimal disruptions, increase patient engagement and improve your revenue cycle is to adopt an easy-to-use integrated patient portal to enhance your existing system. Such solutions have the ability to bolster communication, streamline administrative tasks, drive revenue and ensure premium data protection.

Build vs. Buy

The build vs. buy dilemma extends across the entire healthcare industry. All healthcare disciplines have experienced challenges with overdue payments, billing errors and disconnected programs. While some administrative challenges can be solved by constructing your own platform and providing training, healthcare facilities can take advantage of simplified solutions that streamline the patient revenue cycle. 

If your team lands somewhere in between these two options, you can opt for an integrated approach. For example, if your facility relies on an EHR that doesn’t quite stand up to the challenges of patient payments, you can integrate with an efficient solution to handle your non-core functionalities. Integrating a comprehensive RCM platform with EHR allows your team to capture patient data, document services and offer billing in one place.

The tricky part is finding the perfect fit. What should you solve on your own and what should you outsource? Operational costs, proficiency with technology and time are also major considerations when it comes to choosing the right solution. Ideally, you’ll want your team to use existing solutions for non-clinical needs. This way, you can rely on optimized market solutions to address key challenges like:

• Patient support
• Billing
• Insurance verification
• IT processes
• Payment collection

Outsourcing these tasks can help you deliver a simplified, positive patient experience and position your healthcare facility a step above the others. Instead of spending valuable time on administrative responsibilities, you and your staff can focus on providing high-quality care. When you outsource to a third party, you’ll also benefit from continuous innovation and the simplification of implementing new technology. After all, adding new features and upgrades can be costly and time-consuming. You can worry less about complex medical billing tasks and focus on improving patient satisfaction.

Scalability and Future-Proofing

In the digital age, it’s essential to implement a tech stack that can grow with your business. For example, digital technologies that enable teams to work remotely were in critical need during the COVID-19 pandemic to mitigate transmission and provide quality support to patients. A poor infrastructure for technology can create more barriers for the quick adoption of healthcare innovations.

Flexibility and scalability are vital for your healthcare organization. Whether you need to adapt to patient needs or industry changes, you need a technology infrastructure that can achieve multiple capabilities without major operational disruptions. Should you experience increased processing requirements, additional users or change in traffic, a scalable solution will help you stay competitive and at the forefront of digital health innovation.

Scalability goes hand in hand with future-proofing your healthcare organization. As the industry changes and your patient base grows, you need technology that can integrate emerging tools while leveraging your existing system. Rather than investing in a complete overhaul every time there’s a major shift in your organization’s needs, you can reduce your total cost of ownership by outsourcing your needs to a third party. Choosing a scalable revenue cycle management solution enables you to access the benefits of new technology without the added expenses of out-of-pocket software subscriptions, features and upgrades.

Seamlessly Enhance Your Tech Stack With Millennia’s End-to-End Patient Payment Solution

When upgrading your healthcare data infrastructure and compiling your new healthcare tech stack, it is essential to include software and applications that assist with digital engagement, streamline workflow and improve overall revenue streams. At Millennia, we offer transformative solutions that provide easy integration and implementation to improve patient engagement and bolster payment processes. 

We simplify the patient process and revenue cycle management and serve a range of medical and care settings by offering various patient payment features and tools. With our Millennia Patient Payment Solution end-to-end solution, you can improve patient engagement and experience, make digital payments more accessible and ensure seamless integration with your existing infrastructure. To learn how we can improve your healthcare tech stack, request a free consultation with Millennia today!

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