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IoT Enhances Healthcare Enterprise Resource Planning

IoT enabled enterprise resource planning gives healthcare organizations the visibility to incorporate IoT data seamlessly into infrastructure operations.

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to significantly impact the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market as smart devices continue to connect people, processes, and data.

IoT enterprise resource planning in healthcare

According to a recent Research and Markets report, IoT is anticipated to enhance ERP system efficiency by aligning physical operations with digital assets.

ERP systems facilitate the flow of information among different IT infrastructure solutions to improve the flow of data across an organization. According to the report, cloud and AI technology support ERP systems by providing scalability and intelligent insights. Introducing IoT initiatives into cloud deployments gives ERP solutions another layer of data to process and streamline.

Report authors predicted that the IoT ERP software services market will be valued at $49.9-billion by 2022, and about 50 percent of the global enterprise market, including healthcare, will deploy some kind of IoT enabled ERP by 2022.

The report also found that nearly all enterprise functions will require significant updates to prepare for and maintain IoT enabled ERP.

According to Black Book research report conducted last month, the healthcare industry remains underinvested in ERP technology while technology funding priorities went to cybersecurity, population health, and analytics in 2015. As a result, many healthcare organizations are currently without an ERP solution to manage new IT infrastructure initiatives.

"Crucial back-end software that manages finance, supply chain and inventory management, purchasing, payroll and coding have been disregarded into a confused entanglement of different products that don't communicate and left executives with the inability to realize cost savings in preparation of value based care," said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book.

"There has been user opposition to deploying a new or upgraded ERP, perceived as carrying a high price tag in a time when clinical deployments overwhelmed hospital staff and budgets."

The Black Book report concluded that the push for value-based care initiatives had a significant impact on the need for ERP systems in health IT infrastructure.

ERP systems allow healthcare organizations the network visibility they need to ensure that all infrastructure systems are working as efficiently as possible.

The rate of ERP solution adoption was generally affected by limited knowledge among C-level executives about the impact or complexity of supply chain on their bottom lines until value-based care became a priority. Value-based care emphasizes accountability to measure cost against outcome, which makes an ERP system important for measuring the effectiveness and value of the many IT solutions organizations have likely implemented.

Many infrastructure cloud deployments are implemented to help organizations save on hardware costs as data access times. ERP solutions ensure that the cloud solutions are operating efficiently enough to save the funds the organization intended as well as ensure data retrieval times are fast enough, allowing clinicians to spend more time with a patient rather than retrieving records.

In a separate report, Black Book findings detailed the top health IT trends going into 2017. The report reiterated the lack of ERP solutions in healthcare, and predicted that healthcare organizations will see the value on a solid ERP solution and more organizations will deploy ERP solutions in the coming year.

IoT-enabled ERP will further allow healthcare organizations to use their IT infrastructure resources accordingly. The growth of IoT devices in the form of connected medical devices suggests the need for ERP solutions that can integrate IoT processes and data with the other IT infrastructure solutions.

As healthcare organizations begin to re-examine ERP solutions based on value-based care initiatives, IoT-enabled ERP may have the features needed to fully incorporate a modern mobile health IT infrastructure

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