The medical field is evolving. Is your company prepared? How to approach digital transformation should be a subject that many CIOs in the healthcare industry consider themselves. It begins with a strategy—one that supports creativity and facilitates stakeholder adoption through a reliable IT infrastructure. I’ll describe how healthcare organisations should tackle this industry-wide shift in the parts that follow.
How To Develop A Successful Digital Innovation Strategy
It takes a disruptive strategy, consistent communication, and careful implementation to successfully turn an existing organisation into an innovative digital-first healthcare enterprise. Because this scale of change will have an impact on business objectives, healthcare services, and IT capabilities, stakeholders across the company must be in agreement.
Evaluate
Make an effort to comprehend the present before considering the future. You must recognise shifting patient demands, financial constraints, and market factors. A gap analysis can be used to assess where you are right now. Consider the following queries.
- What IT skills do you have?
- Which digital tools are used in your company?
- What information do you gather and why?
In general, a present state analysis can show what adjustments must be made to the organisational structure, technical resources, and competency model in order to attain the intended future state.
Define
You probably discovered a dependency on EHR-centric applications throughout the review phase. These systems might have produced technological debt and data silos. The ROI on IT investments may not seem to be sufficient right now. Your strategy must take these organisational risks into consideration and unite stakeholders around a future vision in order to bring about long-lasting change within the firm.
A cross-functional team with perspectives from business, healthcare, and IT has to create your strategy in order to aid in achieving that level of acceptance. Encourage this team to take value generation, asset diversification, and business growth into account when developing the strategy.
Data is a major force behind digital innovation. Make that the generation, storage, and use of data are given priority in your approach.
Communicate
The transformation approach shouldn’t be kept secret once it has been established. Every facet of the organization’s future should incorporate it. Bring together the important players and present your argument for change, your vision, and your set objectives. Stakeholders can integrate the new strategy into their decision-making process if they have a thorough understanding of the corporate goals.
Monitor
The task of strategic leadership is not yet complete. Actually, it is never done. This procedure is iterative. After presenting the plan, you must continually keep an eye on how it is being implemented and how it is affecting the culture and goals of the firm.
You should keep an eye on things inside and check in with important stakeholders to see how it’s doing. Keep an eye out for disruptive events outside your organisation that can force you to change your plan. The industry’s future is rapidly evolving. Your organisation must be equally nimble if it is to keep up.
Digital Health Architecture
You will need to create more IT infrastructure as you pursue digitization. Your current systems, however, will probably place you in a position of significant technical debt. Those systems will need to be reconfigured in order to mitigate this. Let’s examine how you may arrange your organization’s investments in digital health infrastructure to lower the expense of technical debt and increase the organization’s ability to be creative and adaptable to changing demands.
Data
Data is the cornerstone of digital health. Data silos that prevent innovation are an issue for many healthcare companies that focus on electronic health records. By building your digital strategy around a data layer, you may deconstruct those.
Your key goal in this situation is compatibility. Data can be gathered from both new and old apps, standardised using industry best practises (such FHIR), and connected to other components of your digital health ecosystem using IT infrastructure. Opportunities for innovation, such predictive analytics, will arise as these data centres expand.
Components
Your IT department should provide a modular set of software capabilities with published APIs on top of that data layer to enable applications and their data to be reused.
Consider these software features as a collection of development tools. These resources can be employed in the future to build and expand new solutions, include applications from other sources, and let end users participate in ecosystem growth.
Tools
Now that your data layer and software components are interconnected, you can give patients, providers, and other stakeholders within your company new digital experiences. Consider the last layer of your IT infrastructure as a design sandbox where you may create better clinical and operational workflows.
When these three layers are combined, your organisation should be able to focus on developing cutting-edge applications and potent analytics that support your larger business goals and enhance the delivery of health care.
Benefits And Risks Of The Digital Health Approach
You can react more quickly to shifting consumer needs, corporate plans, and external industry dynamics if you have a modern IT infrastructure. With little technical debt, future IT investments will yield a higher return on investment. Additionally, the data you provide may be useful and strong. It can help your company become more independent of just one or two software components, making it more future-proof. Additionally, it can encourage interoperability, creating chances for innovation both inside and externally.
The dangers can change depending on your company’s circumstances. This kind of significant adjustment might not be suitable for everyone. It’s possible that stakeholders won’t want to abandon an infrastructure that is EHR-centric. They might underline regulatory difficulties or draw attention to the high cost of change. Many of these dangers can be reduced if you take the plunge and ensure your future in healthcare by careful preparation, open communication, and efficient resource management.
Recognize that this change won’t happen right away. It could take the sector as a whole five to ten years. Only 10% of the market is now served by video healthcare consultations. Because of this, I think the timing is right to start down the path of becoming a healthcare institution that prioritises digital technology. You may position your company to lead the healthcare sector toward digital health by reorganising your IT infrastructure.
