.jpg)
Consumer technologies are going through a revolutionary transformation post COVID-19 in Healthcare. A patient can sit in their homes and book a consultation, physical parameters shared, get the medicines to their doorstep and chat with doctors and so on—all from their smartphones. Most of our lifestyle needs are transformed by technology and we get almost everything in a click on our mobile. But when a healthcare worker then enters the hospital for a day’s work, many a times, the technology shift is entirely different, are they still not heavily obsessed with paper and manual processes?
Optimization of business process is a subject of increasing concern and a critical success factor for healthcare organizations worldwide in a post COVID unfavorable economic scenario; improving operational efficiency is therefore of utmost importance. A business process or technology that doesn’t move in the velocity of consumer technology or even lifestyle technology, will add stress to healthcare workers, moreover as new generation professionals enter into the workforce, present manual and disconnected applications will cause damages in the eco system.
In order to reduce operational budget by 30% to survive the slump period (as most of Healthcare CFOs believe) healthcare organizations should optimize manpower or optimize outcome by shifting their daily complex -labor dependent activities into a faster, integrated, paper less process.
Integration & Access: Organizations are investing on digital technology which has direct patient/revenue interaction such as HIS, EMR, Telemedicine, point of sale and diagnostic applications. However, there are very few administrative process software available such as HRMS, Incident reporting, KPIs, etc. Most of such applications available are from different providers and don’t allow a complete sync or do not addressing real operational pains. 80% of such software typically involves gathering, storing and then preparing certain reports without integration or analysis.
Operational technology applications require access to diverse types of data, a platform for operations optimization must be scalable to handle data and support the aggregation and integration of data from various departments such as Human resources to Surgery department or IP pharmacy to quality department.
There are number of administrative activities identified as cumbersome and time consuming such as document control, medical staff privileging process, Key Performance measure tracking, ongoing evaluation of doctors, accreditation compliances and audits, etc. Some countries have a pay for quality system where large number of KPIs are required by regulatory authority on a monthly basis. Hospitals are managing such activities traditionally with a heavy labor engagement and hospital leadership agree that no useful data is readily available for an analysis or improvement.
The culprit: though the underlying factors are multifaceted, I would like to list two critical success factors which could take care of the whole change.
1) Leadership: Leadership/corporate focus is more on patient care and revenue centric business re engineering, generic organizational processes is often overlooked. They are executed under an environment that is not much changing and it is commonly accepted to continue traditionally. I admit not much cost benefit studies are available to trigger the shift.
2) IT Roles: Information technology ownership is largely evolved around IT department in a hospital, which does organization wide IT enterprises management such as HIS, EHR etc or manage all sorts of communication technologies. Business units heads or department heads are not part of process design or IT revolutions. Healthcare digitalization processes team require highly involved process owners due to their degree of dynamism, complexity and multi-disciplinary nature.
A collective understanding of these constraints and their interrelationships will enable healthcare organizations to integrate operational technology with E-Health technology for developing a solid technological infrastructure to truly enhance the delivery of quality healthcare and overcome survival threat during worse financial seasons.
Take away: If your answer to below questions are "yes" in most of it, it is the time to turn into digital
AccreHealth Technologies offer workflow solutions that can transform your complex, everyday operational procedures to digitize. Contact Thomas at thomas@partnersconsultants.com or visit www.accrehealthtech.com
By Admin | Posted on April 7, 2021
