How The Patient's Home Presents A New Frontier for Clinical Care.
Healthcare today is ripe for disruption, and no aspect of the health industry more so than the hospitalization paradigm, (or treatment model) itself, whereby delivery of all acute or post-primary care consultations and treatments are administered to patients within the traditional hospital care setting only. However,
Hospitalisation has proven to be an impediment, to some patients to their successfully receiving some forms of treatment,
Such as for some types of mental health conditions for example, due to what some can perceive to be ‘the stigmatization of being hospitalized’. Moreover, it's also important to recognize that hospitalization as a model for delivery of patient care, hasn’t fundamentally changed in well over a hundred years.
The Hospitalisation Paradigm – The Nature & Issues
So what then are the issues?, we're just going to touch on some of the main drivers behind this push to now evolve the Hospital treatment model or paradigm in this 'ThoughtCast', (so this will by no means be exhaustive). So we're just going to touch very briefly on 4 key points or drivers namely: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the need to continue to deliver Value-based digitally optimised care; Issues around the current status of The Hospital's Operational Backbone; the Need to drive Healthcare to Patients,- to give them more ownership and autonomy over their own treatments, data and health destinies; and fourthly and lastly
the convergence of exponential technologies.
So we're going to look in very high level at the confluence of all of these things on the current evolutionary push to evolve the current Hospital treatment system or model, or the Hospitalisation Paradigm.
Then in terms of the nature of what a safe, compliant digital evolution of the Hospitalisation Paradigm or model might entail, were only going to look, again in very high-level at just two points, in terms of the push to evolve, providing an opportunity to really Re-imagine Healthcare, and then go on to look at in concluding, just one of the fundamental things that any hospital wanting to embrace this digital evolution of their hospital treatment system or model must do, in order to enshrine the interests and safety of patients as paramount in order to effect this 'Cyber-Physical ' Transformation successfully. Finally we'll see how this aligns to the expectations of patients, around use of technology, access to care, and management of their treatments.
[A Brief Excerpt from this report follows}
We’ve said that hospitalization as a treatment delivery model or paradigm, hasn’t evolved in any real way in over a hundred years, despite the fact that it is by no means the most efficient mechanism for administering care, nor the most suitable for all types of clinical treatments.
The 'Fourth Industrial Revolution?' & Delivering Value-Based Digitally Enabled, Optimised Care.
Furthermore, The world is now embarked upon what’s being described as the fourth industrial revolution. This new era is being heralded as an ‘era of exponential technology,’ and is being driven by increased interconnectivity and innovations in smart automation.
However as always with healthcare, just to add to the complexity,
the requirement to continue to drive towards delivery of ever-improved high quality, safe, ‘value-based’ digitally-enabled care, in other words needing to continue to strive to ‘do more with less,’
Will bring its own challenges, as digital particularly, especially in the initial phases of implementing can counter the notion of 'Value' enshrined in this principle, and thus impact not only the quality and evolution of innovation, but the culture of innovation within the organisation/ hospital itself. For these reasons, this principle will need to be revisited, and addressed from the policy-level, for this new era, if it's to retain its relevance, and not cripple good innovation.
The Hospital's Operational Backbone
Furthermore, negotiating the fourth industrial revolution has the added complexity for Healthcare, that in reality, it's still really in the throes of trying to fully master the technologies, and innovations of the old or previous era, and is now going to be required to also rise to the challenge of simultaneously innovating in the new. As an aside I would like to point out, that speed here is of the essence, I would point out that Health as a sector is somewhat late to the party.
Digitisation and automation of the Hospitals end-to-end processes and operation, is the basic, core capability or prerequisite for a hospital to even be ready to 'play' in this new technological era.
We call this core or basic capability, that's needed to participate in the new digital era, 'The Operational Backbone' of the Hospital. In the UK, this was v much the culmination of the journey the sector began back in the early 2000's, as Hospitals began en-masse to start adopting Electronic Health Record, (EHR), and supplementary clinical specialty IT solutions in earnest.
These initial implementations (to deploy EHR's) should ideally all by now be complete. However, am aware, there still remains a small number of outliers, or locations, namely hospitals where this may not be altogether the case, and for this reason, the Health CIO/ CDO must now do everything they can to try to catch up as quickly as possible, in order to be in a position to satisfactorily meet and support the demand, including architecturally (from the perspectives of their enterprise) for the next wave of digital and technological change.
To do this effectively, in locations where they are late (in completing these initial projects), the Health CIO/ CDO will need to take the initiative, take ownership of, and remediate the gaps in organisational knowledge especially at the C- or Board level, due to some of the
New strategic risks posed by some of the new technologies, and the current lack of legislative direction around use of a number of them.
The Health CIO/CDO will need to manage this as part of their future digital strategy, and ongoing oversight, and support the organisation/ hospital accordingly including through tailored engagement plans that support organisation-wide enhanced-digital education and literacy, to manage innovations in the new technologies across the gaps in staff knowledge.
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For further details about this framework, see this link. Paradigm
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