Digital Transformation In Healthcare: 5 Key Tips To Success
Are you looking to successfully adopt and integrate technologies to solve healthcare challenges?
Today, there is a lot of buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it can help solve today’s healthcare challenges. As a result, digital transformation in healthcare is now gaining momentum.
With that, there are also valid operational concerns that AI and other digital health technologies will be another overpromised-underdelivered tool that will burden staff workload more and not solve the problems set out to fix.
In this article, you will discover five essential tips for achieving a successful digital transformation, which will effectively address stakeholder concerns and solve issues.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is an ongoing journey to adopt and integrate new technologies into all business areas to continuously evolve to meet the ever-changing customer expectations and how they use technology.
It is rethinking your approach to the business process with a consumer-friendly approach while simultaneously changing its operations and culture. As you would with Lean principles for operational excellence, you will start with identifying the value.
For healthcare, it is reimaging the patient-centric experience and rethinking new care delivery, from home hospitals to enhanced mobile experiences, while supporting the clinicians with workflows to make their work life easier.
Healthcare Challenges And Innovation
“True inventiveness happens when you care about the little problems”
To say the healthcare industry is going through a massive amount of change today is an understatement, and most of it is being fueled by technological innovations.
This has accelerated the digital transformation in healthcare to create more value for patients and, most importantly, to help solve the challenges faced today that are impacting their day-to-day operations and patient outcomes, such as:
Workforce shortages
Clinician burnout
Need to control costs with financial pressures
Inefficiencies in business processes, provider, and nursing workflows
Medical errors caused by human error
Changes in patient expectations of care delivery and service
Promises Of Technology
The advancements in digital health, especially AI, can eliminate tedious administrative tasks and improve decision-making speed, allowing clinicians more time to devote to their patients and develop stronger relationships. Telehealth and home hospitals allow patients to receive treatment from the comfort of their own homes instead of staying in a hospital. Automation and cloud computing can improve efficiency, while robotics can reduce the risk of human error and enable nurses to spend more time with patients instead of rushing from one floor to another.
All very promising.
Now, let’s discuss operational concerns with integrating these new technologies.
Operational Concerns
There are concerns among operations that AI and other digital health technologies may not live up to their promises and instead create more work for staff. This could include having to learn a new tool, impacting patient relationships, adding extra steps to the workflow, or may not solve the problem as promised.
So, how do you overcome these concerns?
Five Key Tips For Success!
1: Know your goal. What is the desired outcome? Align with business outcomes.
2: Include operations and other stakeholders from the beginning and have their involvement in the design phase.
3: Map the value stream and identify the pain points. Observe their workflows and listen to the people. Will this technology solve these pain points or add to it?
4: Understand the digital literacy level of the patients/consumers and operational staff.
5: Have a Change Management strategy with the project and executive leadership involved.
