In an era of healthcare policy reform, it isn’t surprising that 81 percent of the top global healthcare executives worldwide anticipate substantial change in their industry. While opinions vary substantially over the future of the healthcare system, there is very little disagreement that the healthcare sector itself has a long way to go to reach the level of efficiency, consistency and productivity expected in businesses outside the healthcare world.
Consider these statistics:
- One-third of medical procedures are performed unnecessarily;
- U.S. hospitals waste $12 billion annually due to poor communication;
- And 1.5 milllion Americans are harmed annually by errors in the way medications are prescribed, delivered and taken.
Even amidst these great challenges, though, there are immense opportunities. These opportunities involve better connecting healthcare providers, modernizing hospital systems to meet the changing ways people work and live today, and exploiting information to make better, more informed patient care decisions.
Part of the change in healthcare will come from the technologies underlying delivery of medical services. Great opportunities accompany the advances in these technologies, but the challenge for hospitals is being able to anticipate the coming changes in their industry and use technologies to meet them, while delivering the innovation that will drive enhanced patient care and better collaboration between medical professionals. As computational power becomes pervasive in unexpected places – within devices, processes and services that were previously manual or mechanical – the hospital’s technology becomes a substrate upon which doctors can tap their colleagues’ experience, opinions and expertise to become more effective in delivering patient care.
Today, forward-thinking hospitals are already leading the way in showing how workflows and processes can be architected so that they orient themselves for the end user.
Take a leading university medical center in Europe as one example. It is a Level 1 trauma center that administers more than 10,000 treatments annually. Until recently, like many other hospitals, patients were brought into the treatment area according to arrival time rather than medical priority.
To work smarter, the medical center started to use real-time location tags on ID bracelets to track patients through their entire hospital stay, from admission to discharge. These tags automatically tracked patient treatment, waiting times and patient location to optimize patient care and treatment processes, and integrated with the hospital’s information systems.
Now, attending physicians and nurses can receive alerts like ‘patient X is in room Y ready to be seen by doctor Z’. By working smarter rather than harder, the hospital was able to reduce waiting times for patients, improve productivity and increase patient security. Hospitals such as this one have found that by linking technology and people in a way that primarily focuses on the business outcomes, the work environment becomes smarter and more dynamic.
I have seen that the most successful hospitals work smarter by following the following three tenets: 1) optimize processes in an agile way; 2) connect people for collaboration through any device, irrespective of geography or time; and 3) create a participatory culture that encourages collaboration and innovation. These hospitals are putting themselves in the best position to tackle the challenges of today by using technologies that transform burdensome processes for smarter work.
In the end, these organizations will lead the charge to fully transform the way the industry works, bringing long-term change to the way hospitals deliver care and innovate for the future.
Nancy Pearson is vice president of marketing for IBM's integration software business, which includes the delivery of business process management solutions for healthcare and other industries.
