‘I am here, and it is now or never’, says Digital Transformation to Healthcare
This cover picture of this article is from a news article in the CNBC news site which has some key take home points:
‘Hospital systems are reporting massive spikes in virtual visits.’
‘Governments are relaxing rules that made it challenging for telehealth companies to grow.’
‘This pandemic just accelerated what we might have seen in four or five years’
‘Suddenly now we’re in the future’
The inevitability of a digital transformation in healthcare organization and businesses
The healthcare system is undergoing a seismic shift in the way healthcare is delivered and practiced. Compared to other industries, healthcare has always been slow to embark on the assimilation of digital strategies within the workflow and the pipeline of care provisions. The challenges are/ were many and few include:
- Technology in silos, security concerns, interoperability, standardization etc
- Resistance to change
- Inherent complexity of the healthcare system
- Cost
To introduce, Digital Transformation is the integration of digital technology into all aspects of how a healthcare organization and business interacts with patients, healthcare providers and regulators. Digital transformation is fundamentally about improving patient experience
The COVID-19 effect on the digitization process
As much as COVID-19 has plunged the globe into a crisis, it has also arguably opened up the global healthcare system to the gates to many new digital services. The pandemic has created a chance to turbo boost digital transformation in healthcare. This is the point of time when healthcare industry holds an incredibly high potential for optimizations and savings with the use of information and communication technologies.
For instance, the healthcare system saw a tremendous increase in the numbers of telehealth and virtual consultation services during this time. This reveals that this is the time to catch on the speed of the digitization process in healthcare.
Key ingredients to cook the perfect digital transformation experience
Digital transformation of a healthcare organizations and businesses should be understood as process and a journey and not a destination to reach.
A successful digital transformation in the healthcare environment requires bringing together and coordinating far range of efforts than is seen or visible as the tip of the ice berg.
A successful transformation is a perfectly orchestrated interplay of the following ingredients. It is necessary to identify the existing state of these ingredients before initiating the digital transformation process.
These include:
- Technology
- Data
- Workflow and processes
- Change capability
- Communication
In addition, an effective digital transformation requires acquiring new talent and strong leadership with a vision that will contemplate the process of this transformation.
Technology
Internet of Things, blockchain, data lakes, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud services, wearables, and a multitude of potential of emerging technologies are trying to revamp healthcare. And while many of these are becoming easier to use, understanding how any particular technology contributes to transformational opportunity, adapting that technology to the specific needs of the healthcare, and integrating it with existing systems is extremely complex. This requires an interdisciplinary talent and skills and a core understanding that all tech is not IT but includes a large amount of domain knowledge and skills. Medical informaticians with healthcare domain experience will play an important part of this talent pool.
Data
The current situation of healthcare data from healthcare organizations and systems presents a paradox. Most organizations know data is important, and they know quality is bad, yet they waste enormous resources by failing to put the proper roles and responsibilities in place. The unfortunate reality is that at many healthcare organizations today most data is not up to basic standards, and the rigors of transformation require much better data quality and analytics. (see my earlier article on data experience)
The key part of this transformation is understanding new types of data, leveraging proprietary data, and integrating everything together for a good data experience for the end-user. Additionally, it also requires thinking through and communicating the data they need now and the data they’ll need after transformation. It also means helping front-line workers to improve their own work processes and tasks such that they create data correctly.
Work flow and processes
Wok flow transformation requires an end-to-end mindset, a rethinking of ways to meet healthcare professional needs, seamless connection of work processes, and the ability to manage across silos and going forward.
But the current scenario, is the technology stakeholders and the healthcare stakeholders work in silos and most organizations lack to foresee the positions of the health informatics experts in connecting these silos and providing a natural fit with the needs and the capabilities.
This interdisciplinary talent group has the ability to align these silos in the direction of the end user to improve existing processes and design new ones, and a strategic sense to know when incremental process improvement is sufficient and when radical process reengineering is necessary.
Change capability and leadership
Change should take place at all levels during a digital transformation, especially when it comes to talent and capabilities. The leadership should be able to develop talents and skills throughout the organization. This includes redefining the roles and responsibilities of individuals.
The other key change that is required is having a cultural and behavioral change that are patient centric. One related key to successful digitalization is establishing practices related to working in new ways, by providing capacity building, continuous learning and involving the healthcare professionals at every level of the change management.
Communication
Good communication has always been a key success factor in traditional change efforts, and it is just as important in a digital transformation. In a digital context, healthcare organizations must get more creative in the channels they are using to enable the new, quicker ways of working and the speedier mind-set and behavior changes that a digital transformation requires. One change is to move away from traditional channels that support only one-way communication (company-wide emails, for example) and toward more interactive platforms (such as internal social media) that enable open dialogues among the end users.
Are you ready to embrace digitalization?
Look at the final big picture and develop some key objectives of your digitalization process.
Ask yourselves these questions -
- What will be the level of improvement in providing patient care and support?
- How will your patients perceive the potential digitalization?
- How will it help better serve your patients and other service providers?
- How will it influence employee satisfaction and adherence?
- What capacity building, additional training and skills needs to be improved?
- What is the change it will imbibe to the current process?
Allowing the management and your team getting into the groove
Digital transformation is complex and it requires constant change of doing the new for the health professionals and other employees. Your digitalization pipeline should have answers for these questions:
- What is the current state of readiness?
- What is the level of change by the top management?
- How comfortable will be your frontline workers, other staff, patients and the community?
- Are they willing to experiment and test?
- Will you allow learning by mistakes?
- Do you have allowance to identify new skills and talents to supplement the advancement?
Measure change and implementation, iterate, analyze and continue
Assess the current state of your organization, employee engagement, patient expectations, and this will reveal areas of improvement and will help identify a starting point.
- Do you have a monitoring system in place?
- Do you allow feedback collection and measurement of these feed backs?
- Can you identify road blocks and discuss it with the top management?
Strong communication mechanisms
Having a strong communication mechanism will provide insight into what needs attention.. This should be done in combination with patient and employee feedback. This will also surface best practices Greater transparency and knowledge sharing will help accelerate progress toward the desired end state.
- Do you allow cross departmental and cross functional communication and knowledge share?
- Do you have an internal interaction mechanism?
- What are your existing feedback mechanisms?
Conclusion
It is obviously visible that the digital transformation of healthcare organizations and businesses is inevitable. The earlier we embark digitization in healthcare, the better and faster will be the benefits for businesses and patients. The current situation loudly asserts ‘Don’t miss the bus’.
Arunakiry Natarajan holds a Master’s in Medical Informatics from Technische Hochschule Deggendorf (THD) in Germany. Additionally, he holds a Master’s in Dentistry with specialization in Oral Medicine and Radiology and certifications in the field of Data Science. Following a career in academics and in clinical dentistry, he moved into healthcare data science. He followed this career with an immense belief that apt use of health data, analytics, automation, and responsible AI can spark a digital metamorphosis in health systems across the global healthcare ecosystem. Currently, he is working at management4health as a Project Manager and a Digital Health Data Specialist. He is also a webinar and workshop provider in clinical decision support systems for the students of THD.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.