Healthcare Systemness: A Journey of Collaboration, Automation and Patient Care
The drive to achieve systemness in healthcare is a complex but crucial undertaking. This blog post explores key insights gleaned from a webinar featuring healthcare leaders who discussed the challenges and opportunities associated with creating a more cohesive and efficient healthcare system.
Part 1: The Pillars of Systemness
The first part of the webinar laid the groundwork for understanding systemness. Here are the central themes that emerged:
- Leadership and Collaboration: Achieving systemness requires a leadership team that prioritizes collaboration between business and IT functions. Everyone involved needs to be working towards the same “North Star” – a vision for a more integrated and efficient healthcare system.
- Workflow Standardization: Standardizing workflows across different departments and locations is essential for streamlining processes and enabling automation. This may involve overcoming variations in how clinical staff perform certain tasks.
- Cultural Change: Implementing new technologies is often easier than achieving cultural change. Getting buy-in from clinicians and staff requires clear communication about the benefits of systemness and how it will ultimately improve patient care.
- Automation for Efficiency: Automation can be a powerful tool for reducing errors and improving efficiency. However, it requires well-documented workflows. Without clear documentation of how tasks are currently performed, automation becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Part 2: Challenges and Strategies on the Road to Systemness
The second part of the webinar delved deeper into the practical challenges of achieving systemness and offered strategies for overcoming them. Here are the key takeaways:
- Documentation Hurdles: A significant challenge is the lack of standardized documentation for clinical workflows. This makes it difficult to automate tasks and integrate data across different systems.
- Building Trust and Collaboration: Successful systemness initiatives require trust and collaboration between IT and clinical teams. IT needs to understand the needs of clinicians, and clinicians need to be open to new ways of working.
- The Power of User Engagement: Clinicians are more likely to embrace new technologies if they are involved in the design and implementation process. IT departments should actively seek feedback from clinicians and address their concerns.
- Data Quality and Automation: Clean and standardized data is essential for successful automation and machine learning applications in healthcare. Technologies like AI can be used to capture handwritten documents and improve data quality.
- The Challenge of Merging Systems: Mergers and acquisitions in healthcare can create challenges when different Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) need to be integrated. Standardizing workflows across these disparate systems is crucial for achieving a unified patient experience.
The Road Ahead
The path towards systemness in healthcare is ongoing. However, the benefits are undeniable – improved patient care, reduced costs, and increased staff satisfaction. By fostering collaboration, embracing new technologies and focusing on data quality, healthcare organizations can move closer to a future where a seamless and efficient system of care is the norm.
Beyond the Blog:
This blog post provides a brief overview of the key points discussed in the webinar. The complete webinar offers a richer and more nuanced discussion. Consider watching the full webinar to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with achieving systemness in healthcare.Watch the webinar: Leveraging Integration and Automation to Drive Towards Systemness.
