Using tech to grow into the future

If anyone doubted the benefits of using technology to help future proof a business, the past two years have put that to rest. While some businesses were in a strong position to innovate and understood the power of digital, those with non-existent or immature digital transformation initiatives floundered.

Fast forward two years and there has never been a better time for digital transformation and nor has there been a greater need. Customers and partners demand it and small-to-medium businesses must develop and keep improving their digital offerings to remain competitive. 

Great efficiencies, cost savings, more secure data and immediate connection with customers are just some of the benefits a robust digital transformation strategy can deliver and the good news is, advanced technology is now within reach of businesses of all sizes.

Growing demand

For SiSU Health Group, using digital tools to democratise health assessments has put them in a strong position to meet a growing demand for digital health in a post-Covid world.

The health tech company is responsible for the SiSU Health StationTM a  Class IIa medical device which is manufactured by SiSU Health Group in Melbourne, Australia that allows users to check blood pressure, weight, height, body composition, heart rate and heart age in under five minutes.

To date, more than 1.5 million people have used the station across a range of settings in Australia, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Germany.

In May this year, the four millionth health check was undertaken, says Patrick Hannebery, head of analytics, insights & research partnerships, SiSU Health.

“The scale of what we’ve done so far as a small Australian company is remarkable. We’ve got literally the largest machine measured cloud-stored pool of medical data in the country. We recently saw the 4 millionth check done on the stations and each of those health checks have been free of charge to the user,” he says.

The rise of digital health that sprang up during the pandemic has been a long time coming, he adds. The technology was there — but the impetus for people to use it was not so clear.

“The digitisation of healthcare is something that simply had to happen because there’s so much inefficiency and waste in the sector. While COVID has of course been incredibly disruptive, we have never seen so many people being asked to practice preventive health — and for them to do so using the tools now being offered.”

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The future is now

SiSU Health is a great example of a small business that has embraced the value of cloud computing and been able to scale their operations as needed, says Vini Amilthan, migration and modernisation lead at Amazon Web Services.

“There are many value drivers that you have from moving to the cloud, as well as cost savings and improvements to efficiency, you can deploy new features and build new applications a lot faster as SiSU Health has been able to do,”  says Amilthan.

Hannebery says the company has been reliant on cloud computing from the beginning of operations and it has allowed them to grow and adopt new applications and data solutions as the business also grew.

“Ultimately our business will use cloud computing not only to scale more effectively, but to use machine learning to provide a more personalised experience to people to get them back onto the station and keep them on a path of health improvement or maintenance of good behaviours,” says Hannebery.

As well as taking advantage of storage and infrastructure services cloud computing provides, security is a crucial factor for many businesses using the cloud.

“Businesses are able to meet core security and compliance requirements with ease and can even automate manual security tasks. That means they can shift their focus to scaling and innovating the business and not focusing on the mundane security tasks,” says Amilthan.

For SiSU Health, being ahead of the game and with technology already in operation, puts the company in an excellent position to continue to grow.

“COVID has revealed the bottlenecks in the healthcare system — and it is very clear that just putting more people on the ground and doing things the same old way is not going to cut it going forward. 

“We are offering a hybrid between preventive health and chronic disease management and we are very much focused on pushing infrastructure services and solutions to where the people are, we couldn’t do that without accessing the technology and staying abreast of developments,” says Hannebery.

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