By Mary Hall Gregg, CIO.com,
Developing market knowledge to gain a better understanding of your industry and your customers' needs isn't a sideline activity -- it's critical to a company's growth.
A broad and deep understanding of your business, your market and your customers enables you to identify the products and services that will create sustained value for your customers and sustained competitive advantage for your company.
Such understanding, along with knowledge of technology trends, is essential to aligning IT and business strategies to drive growth.
As a healthcare company, Quest Diagnostics provides services to multiple customers including physicians, hospitals, health plans, employers, insurers and pharmaceutical companies -- and of course patients, who are at the center of everything we do.
Because we work with all of these constituents, we have a 360-degree view of the healthcare market and its trends. Seventy per cent of healthcare decisions involve laboratory test information, so laboratories such as Quest are at the center of many healthcare IT initiatives. We spend a lot of time with our business partners and customers understanding their needs and how technology can have the most positive impact.
Emerging technology is another market force that determines what we are able to do for our customers. Using technology to drive innovation helps us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We have therefore developed a number of value-added IT services.
Quest's value-added IT services
Online appointment scheduling
Thousands of patients visit Quest's patient service centers (PSC) to have blood drawn for tests. A key factor in creating a positive patient experience is to minimize a patient's waiting time in the PSC. An online appointment scheduling service has meant patients can identify PSC locations that are convenient, schedule an appointment and retrieve directions.
Care360 physician portal
The portal is used by over 100,000 physicians to order tests and receive test reports electronically. Quest recognized that electronic prescribing would be a major thrust in the healthcare industry to reduce medication errors, so it integrated electronic prescribing into the product.
Point-of-care testing
Point-of-care testing is where the collection of samples, testing and reporting of results occurs within minutes in the doctor's office or hospital. Quest has recently acquired several point-of-care product companies and is now working to enhance Care360 to work with them.
Mary Hall Gregg is the CIO of Quest Diagnostics.
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