An AI Generated Theme Song for Paradigm's Digital 'BlueSky' Ideation Lab,
or 'Ideatory' called: 'BlueSky' Dreaming.
Theme No. 1
Introduction to This Digital Dream-Scape
Transforming The Culture of Care
People-to-People
Harnessing technology to craft a compassionate health service to faciliate the 'business' or transaction of health, which is people-to-people, or 'people serving, or providing care to other people'. However, is digital evolving this relationship into more of a people-to-people interchange?
#theIdeatory #PI
Welcome to Theme 1 of Paradigm's 'Blue Sky' Ideatory, or Healthcare Ideation Laboratory, where we aim to explore the best methods and or approaches for the Health CIO, or (Health) Digital Director to start to get to grips with the question of how best to start to articulate a digital vision for their hospitals/ health organisations.
1.1.1 Should Compassion Have a Role in Innovation?
- Compassion, Intelligence, and Efficiency -
The aim of this first, Theme 1 entitled: Transforming the Culture of Care, which is broken down into 3 segments or Vision-scapes is firstly to create a common frame of understanding around our present day Health service, in light of its current context, challenges, immediate demands and future requirements, and from there begin to chart an achievable course, towards a 'Re-imagined' model for future IT/digitally-enabled compassionate and effective care. Note, the emphasis, here being on the word 'compassionate', because our aim shouldn't be to create a future-state health service that innovates technology blindly, purely for the sake of innovating technology, but innovates (digital) intelligently.
1.1.1.2 Digital A Journey
Someone once said that 'digital is a journey not a destination' they were alluding to the iterative nature of digital deployments. However, if we don't leverage technology 'compassionately’, efficiently, and with intelligence, ensuring it provides a genuine 'value-add' to the patient treatment experience, we risk ultimately losing the trust, full adoption, and support of patients in the long run, therefore as we proceed we'll need to, as per the age-old healthcare adage, ensure we continue to 'put patients at the centre of everything we do', and that has several important implications, including for how we engage patients throughout the journey that is digital, that we'll come on to look further into as we proceed.
1.1.2 The Human Nature of Healthcare
It's important to remember that
Healthcare is first and foremostly a human/ people-oriented 'business' or interaction at it’s core, it is 'people (Healthcare staff and clinicians) serving, and providing care to other people (namely patients)'.
But digital can also have a very interesting influence or effect on this most traditional of interactions, morphing or evolving the traditional doctor-patient relationship into more of what we'll call, 'an interchange'. Whereby patients have been known to now digitally 'disrupt' their doctors, by successfully proposing digital technologies to them, as aids to their own treatment, as happened in the case of diabetes, as we'll come on to see.
1.1.2.1 A People-to-People Interchange?
Why do we say that digital has the potential to make the traditional doctor-patient relationship more of 'a People-to-People interchange?' This is certainly an interesting question. If we think about what happened in the case of diabetes, for example, where patients, in wanting greater convenience and control in managing their conditions, took the initiative in identifying and personally adopting suitable technologies they found, introducing them to their physicians, who then adopted and incorporated them as mechanisms or protocols for their, and even wider patient treatment.
This does point to another important aspect of the ongoing digital revolution, what am calling Digital Patriation or appropriation, and the fact that so much good innovation is already ongoing and available, however the health sector has been slow at times to identify and adopt, or appropriate it, and pull good innovation into the health service. Though on the other hand, in view of the technical challenges, and sorts of risks, including to ultimately patient treatment, that could result, from the simultaneous adoption of an untamed proliferation of systems, perhaps we shouldn't view our current status too negatively, but look at instead, as more of an opportunity to get things right from the start. However, as we've seen, as was the case for diabetes, the health sector does run the risk that if they continue to delay innovating, their patients will eventually pre-empt or 'disrupt' and do it for them, which isn't a great place to be.
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1.1.3 Contribution of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, (4IR)
As we've been examining in some of our previous ThoughtCasts for our blog 'The Digital Paradigm', we now stand on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, (4IR) which is being heralded as 'an era of exponential technology', not only is the world braced to repeat the same level of innovation to date in the next 14 years, but now into the scope of technical innovation comes distinctly human qualities like compassion, empathy, and also social aspirations like 'values' and sustainability. We'll explore these themes further in our first Vision-Scape, namely: The Challenges for Healthcare (to be published soon).
1.1.4 Implementation vs. Transformation
Granted the aim of implementing technology at all is to realise efficiencies, minimise costs, in short, to make better use of healthcare resources, and also to optimise and enrich the quality and nature of patient treatment, and while this is a fundamental part of our aim.
'Digital also presents us with an opportunity to fundamentally 'Re-imagine' (or transform Healthcare) inspired by the possibilities of technology, and what it can enable, or make possible for us.'
Transformation is not an automatic by-product of implementing digital technologies randomly. To transform, we need to be cognisant of the fact that unless we move forward with a clearly articulated vision of what we can, or will harness digital /technologies to achieve, or do for us, and more importantly what we will do for our patients, in terms of how we'll utilise digital technologies to service them, and optimise the interaction, satisfaction and treatment experience of now not only patients, but also 'citizens' (as we'll come on to see), then all we'll really ultimately achieve is implementation, and the hospital, and/ ultimately the Health sector overall won't transform.
This is where to a great extent, the health sector finds itself today. Having made many significant investments over the years in health technologies, in this Spring 2024 Budget, the Government announced it was to make a further £3.4Bn available for a mixture of AI and 'Digitisation', digitisation being the pre-requisite, or enabler for digital. These preliminary 'digitisation' projects to adopt Electronic Patient Record, (EPR) systems and digitise the hospitals end-to-end operations and processes should all ideally by now have long been completed. In a nutshell,
the health sector finds itself somewhat late in coming to the party of digital adoption, particularly as compared to other sectors of the economy, and in addition to this digital naissance or immaturity, still in the position of not really having achieved digitally-enabled transformative change.
A further knock-on effect, or complexity of this, is that consequently, levels of digital intellectual 'equity' are low, again as compared to other sectors of the economy, and now with the onset of the Fourth, (4IR) and even the Fifth Industrial Revolutions (5IR) which are now upon us, the sector will find itself attempting to navigate this new technological reality with serious gaps in its digital knowledge, competence, and experience. This has the potential to be quite problematic, and furthermore there's a risk that the sector could be left permanently on the back foot, and in danger of never really being able to catch-up. (Incidentally, the 5IR was believed to have actually started in 2022).
This is far from a comprehensive view of the issues impacting digital in healthcare today, there are many other additional compounding factors also (not explored here, due to time). We'll come on to explore some of these issues more fully, amongst the themes in our first Digital Vision-Scape. However, the overall result is that the Health sector globally is yet to transform.
1.1.5 Why Not Join Our Online Network or Blog?
The aim of this Ideatory: 'Articulating a Vision for Digital Healthcare' is to challenge and induce discussion and debate. You'll shortly be able to click on the link: VS1.1 The Challenges for Healthcare below to enter the first Digital Vision-Scape, (Coming Soon).
Pls provide any comments, either in our online community (on Linkedin, which is also free to join: The Digital Paradigm), or via the contact section below to continue the discussion, and contribute to the ideation, and roadmap. Or alternatively to receive further content and information on digital transformation in Healthcare, HealthTech, and all things Health-IT , why not join our, Paradigm's Blog.
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This first Ideation, 1.1 Transforming the Culture of Care, is broken down in to 3 main Sub-themes, or Digital Vision-Scapes, (V-S), as set out below:
> The Challenges for Healthcare
> The Culture of Care; and
> Transforming the Culture of Care
Coming Soon!
V-S1.2 The Culture of Care
In this Vision we'll come on to discuss the role of culture both as context for providing us with a greater understanding of both the NHS, and of the nature of healthcare, and explores the role of organisational culture in sustaining innovation and change, and the fact that the Health CIO might also need to prepare himself to also lead a wider engagement around cultural transformation, as part of their mission to both articulate, and inculcate their visions for digital healthcare within their hospitals or health organisations, but what does that all really mean? We'll come on to explore more fully
V-S1.3 Transforming the Culture of Care
In this Vision-scape we work back to first principles to identify the requirements, or foundations needed to truly transform care.
© 2024. This work is licensed via CC BY-ND 4.0.
A Paradigm 'BlueSky' Ideation Laboratory
This Ideatory or Paradigm BlueSky Healthcare Laboratory on Articulating A Vision for Digital Healthcare is set out under 3 high-level Themes, of which this is the first, namely: Transforming the Culture of Care. Each theme is then expanded out, in to several unique Digital Vision-Scapes, which are then explored by segment through a range of separate Visions, and Dreams, where 'BlueSky' thinking is also encouraged to 'Re-imagine' healthcare, which will then be investigated and discussed through a range of Thoughts and (Take Aways or) Ideas.
Articulating A Vision for
This is Paradigm's Digital Healthcare Ideatory, a 'BlueSky' Ideation Laboratory, aiming to set out a future-scape or vision for Healthcare, which is explored under the 3 below headings, segments or Visions.
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Paradigm's Digital Lab: 'Ideatory'
Articulating a Vision for Digital Healthcare