As a CIO (Chief Information Officer) in Healthcare preparing a digital strategy for a UK Hospital, there are several key pieces of advice to consider. Embracing digital transformation in healthcare can lead to significant improvements in patient care, operational efficiency, and overall healthcare outcomes, just to name a few examples. It's important to be intentional about your (or the hospitals) goals or reasons for doing digital, and then work to instil the organisational mindset so that they can truly embrace it. Here are some considerations and essential tips, (not exhaustive) to start to guide you through the process, as to some of the things you should ideally assure you have considered, and or either have put, or be in the process of putting into place, as you start to work with your Trust to crystallise their unique digital vision:
In a poll of Healthcare Executives, what percentage said that the limitations and opportunities of their tech architecture will in future dictate business value
92%
65%
40%
1. Set Clear Objectives
Clearly define your goals and objectives for implementing digital. Whether it's improving patient outcomes, streamlining administrative processes, or enhancing data security, the hospital having well-defined goals for digital, will help keep the organisation focused over the long haul that can be a digital transformation, and give it a way to measure the progress and success of its digital initiatives over time.
2. Engage Stakeholders
Involve key stakeholders from all levels of the organization in the planning and decision-making process. This includes , administrative staff, all Trust business and clinical Teams, as well as the IT teams, and even patients. Don't forget, other healthcare providers within your wider health community (where relevant), especially don't forget to engage with your counterparts, at the other Trusts across your wider Local Health Community, to see where their may be opportunities to optimise the benefits of convergence in services, where this is logical and makes sense, ie: either to deliver more holistic treatments, compelling patient outcomes and or greater convenience to patients, especially where this may significantly enhance the efficiency, workload/ reduce wait times and or deliver cost savings.
Gaining buy-in from key stakeholders will facilitate smoother implementation and adoption to your strategy.
3. Data Security and Privacy
This goes without saying, Healthcare data is highly sensitive and subject to strict regulations like GDPR in the UK, you must have a focus for Data Security and Privacy in your strategy, and also work to ensure your digital initiatives prioritize data security and privacy also. The best way of doing this is to start to embed their principles within the way your Trust and IT Department operate, so that your implementing security by design. In this way you should be able to establish robust cybersecurity measures and adhere to all the relevant legal and regulatory requirements by default.
4. Interoperability
Again, it goes without saying that Interoperability is crucial in healthcare to allow seamless sharing of patient data, and workflow across different systems and providers. Again, this should be worked up into a clear documented strategy so that again, its operationalised within your IT Team, and the Trust by design.
Ensure that the digital solutions you choose can integrate well with existing systems and communicate effectively, and this is an important point, as most IT solutions/ applications will integrate. Do for this reason keep an eye on the quality of integration, in terms of what this means for seamlessness, and slickness of workflow, including across the handoff to other healthcare entities, and be careful to temper your interoperability strategy with an Enterprise mindset for your systems and applications also, to ensure you watch and guard against, the proliferation of disparate (overlapping) systems, or multiple systems with similar capabilities, or that do the same tasks.
5. Patient Experience
Always prioritize the experience for patients first when selecting and implementing digital solutions. While its important that systems be intuitive and user-friendly in order to encourage staff and clinical adoption and minimise the learning curve for staff to adopt and learn new systems. Considering these two objectives simultaneously, ie: Patient and User experience can mean that ultimately an application is selected that doesn't really achieve either objective terribly well in the long run.
6. Training and Support
Provide comprehensive training to all users who will interact with the digital systems. Additionally, have a support system in place to address any issues that may arise during and after the implementation phase, and you may need to develop new models for ongoing support, especially to pick up on future-state requirements to continue to refine their digital initiatives and optimise solutions also post-delivery. So we're talking here about solution optimisation, not maintainance. The busy nature of Hospitals can mean that in a vast number of cases this post- delivery optimisation either doesn't happen at all, or else only very minimally. While this may not be too onerous for smaller hospital systems and applications, it can for some of the larger more expensive hospital systems, (like EPR and Diagnostic solutions for example) stack up to potentially, a significant loss to the Hospital in the value of its investment in that technology over time.
For these reasons you may want to re-think how you'll manage this whole issue (ie: of Training and Support) in the new digital era and how you or the Trust will resource and fund it accordingly. If you get the new model for this right, you'll be able to surface it in your strategy as one of the ways in which digital will transform and raise the bar on support, as well as optimise solutions to add value and deliver efficiencies to hospital services also.
7. Start Small and Scale
Begin with pilot projects or smaller implementations before rolling out larger initiatives, has been tried and proven to be the best approach, and is one with which Hospitals are familiar, and will be pleased to see in your outline strategy. This approach has the advantage of allowing you to identify and address potential challenges early on and refine your strategy before scaling up. On the practical side, you'll also need to start thinking about how you'll work with the hospital to help them adjust and align their mindset to the style of doing the iterative, AGILE, smaller-scale, repeatable 'experiments' that is the nature of digital deployments.
8. Data Analytics and AI
Leverage data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive insights, improve decision-making, and optimize patient care, this will definitely need to feature in your strategy. AI-driven solutions can help with diagnostics, predictive analysis, and personalized treatments. Remember, data is key to Digital. Besides determining and developing your core strategy for Data (for your hospital), you should also seek to embed into your IT Applications strategy, and should also run as a unique workstream for all new Hospital IT solution deployments, and this can put an onerous overhead on your Data Team if not managed strategically.
9. Regulatory Compliance
Essential to avoid penalties and legal issues that can result from non-compliance. It's also important to stay informed about the latest healthcare regulations and standards that impact the use of digital technologies. Again on a pracitical level you should seek to operationalise them by embedding them as benchmarks and standards /within the SOP's. (Standard Operating Procedures) of the relevant IT teams, and in so doing they'll be implemented and enforced by default.
10. Evaluate and Iterate
Periodically surface the evolving digital strategy for the Hospital as you develop, and document it. This will give you an opportunity to evaluate its impact, gather feedback, and make continuous improvements based on the insights gained.
Providing an early view of the evolving strategy to staff, will help them understand the 'trajectory' or thrust of the Trust's digital vision, will help you ensure the completed strategy is a good fit for the hospital, and also provide staff with an opportunity to be consulted, (which believe me they will appreciate), and so feel that they can impact the strategy. This should assist with adoption of the final strategy, and should mean that nothing in your final strategy should come as a shock or a complete surprise to them.
11. Partnerships and Collaboration
Consider collaborating with other healthcare institutions, tech companies, or research organizations. Collaborative efforts can accelerate innovation and create more comprehensive solutions. This hasn't really been very well explored, especially by Trusts to date, possibly due to ethical concerns, which particularly in relation to the NHS can potentially be a fine-line in some of these sorts of arrangements, but with the right motives, and approach such concerns could be safely navigated. Infact, these sorts of collaborations are mandatory for 'good' digital, the overall quality of digital can be greatly enriched by these sorts of collaborations, so is important Trusts consider, and approach these sorts of partnerships with an open mind.
12. Future-Proofing
Technology evolves rapidly, and it's important to future-proof your digital initiatives as much as possible. Plan for scalability, flexibility, mobility and the integration of emerging technologies.
13. Emerging Technologies
Model the vision for your Hospital by talking to and demonstrating the capabilities of the technologies and what they are able to safely do for the Hospital. In order to do this you'll need to keep abreast of new and coming technologies and innovations in Health-IT. This is where Paradigm can help, providing Health CIO's / CDO with Ideation and information on latest innovations in HealthTech, is just one of the ways in which we can help. Why not Join Paradigm's Health Chief Executive Network? (see Link below). We're a group of Health Chief Digital professionals. Committed to innovating IT and digitally transforming Healthcare.
Digital transformation in healthcare can be complex, but with careful planning, strong leadership, and a focus on patient-centric solutions, it can lead to significant improvements in patient outcomes and operational efficiency. Remember that successful (digital) transformation may take time, so be patient and adaptive throughout the process.
Paradigm
Comentarios