KPMG International and the Nuffield Trust, a charitable trust with a mission to improve health care services in the UK, recently published a report that highlights how digital technologies can help enhance health services. 
The report, Digital Health — Heaven or Hell, discusses the fact that health services have been slower than most industries in adopting IT to increase productivity and quality of services.
The use of technology to enhance productivity in the sector has so far been confined to raising efficiency in back office operations and some minor transactions, while leaving the vast majority of patient-facing activity unchanged. 
The report aims to cut through both the narrow approach of "doing the same things, but digitally" and the fanciful predictions about technology’s potential to transform health care.
KPMG has examined the real-life stories of success and failures around the world to find out what really works in achieving productivity gains in health, how organizations can get this right (or wrong), and how the delivery of health care is set to realistically change in the years to come.
The report has identified seven evidence-based major opportunities together with seven practical lessons to capitalize on them. 
Commenting on the report, Abdullah Al-Fozan, chairman of KPMG Saudi Arabia, said: “The Saudi government is fully committed to improving the health care sector and has set strategic goals for this purpose, the most important of which are improving efficiency levels and quality of services and optimizing the country’s potential resources.”
It is possible to begin examining carefully-studied transformation plans before putting them into action in the short run. Such plans should be based on clear and transparent principles that contribute to increasing the flexibility of public health systems, Al-Fozan added.

Source: Arab News