Achieving Innovation's Full Potential

By Steve Deaton, VP, Viztek

We’ve seen the evolution from film to digital x-ray; from beepers to texts and images on smartphones; and from hard journals for research to electronic medical records searching on iPads. These innovations have greatly improved the speed of diagnosis, enabling faster treatment and better patient care. What’s next?

In light of the considerable advances technology has afforded us in healthcare, it is sometimes difficult to imagine the vast room for improvement that still exists. The bar for innovation continues to rise higher than most would have thought possible. But not only are most innovations not perfected the first time around – many took, and still take, significant iterations to get them right. But some innovations don’t offer immediate improvement: they actually take you a step back before you can go forward.

To deliver innovation that is truly effective, the industry must always assess the latest and greatest solutions and consider how their functions can be enhanced further – to keep raising the quality of care delivered to patients. While looking at providing improvements for care, we must also consider the manner in which manual processes digitally impact workflow. We may now be electronic, but have we actually seen the benefits in efficiency when comparing with the time consumed by the previously manual processes?

If we take a look merely at the subset of imaging informatics, there are countless examples that exist today of technology innovation done okay, and sometimes not great. There is something to be said for early adopters. We need them – because nothing is ever right on the first try and early adopters enable any technology developer to work out the kinks and make improvements.

Improving Information Exchange
To deliver higher quality care to patients, an ideal we continue to work towards in healthcare is enabling our care providers to make the most informed decisions possible during diagnosis and treatment. For that, having access to all the available data on a patient is critical. Yet, we continue to run into roadblocks in achieving full patient information.

For example, a large hospital can forward the latest and prior exams for a patient, via its PACS system, to be read by a radiology practice group – but there is no automated method in the industry for also sharing the prior radiology reports, tech worksheets and clinical notes. The ability to share images digitally was a significant step for the future of radiology, but reaching a higher level of confidence in diagnosis is only possible when the additional reports and documentation are easily made available to the radiologists as well.

Another factor to consider is that the extent of a patient’s medical information and history doesn’t always sit within one hospital – it can be scattered across a number of facilities. Caregivers who require as much, if not all, important clinical data on a patient should not only have access to prior reports and studies for a patient from one hospital, but also be able to query facilities in the surrounding region for them. Yet, there is no industry solution that can leverage the sharing and exchange of data to bring such level of value to patient care.

Improving Workflow
Another essential aspect the industry cannot lose sight of in its ongoing pursuit of innovation is workflow. Innovation in healthcare helps processes just as much as it changes them - something provider and vendor organizations must keep in mind when developing or implementing new solutions. The effective software solutions of the future must not only innovate to improve technology, but also innovate to improve workflow, to be truly impactful in delivering better care to patients.

Today’s radiologists, for example, usually only have access to what technologists provide for them. Although advances in technology have transitioned manual processes to softcopy, which now allow technologists to share several documents of information with radiologists in one shot, they forget to factor in a new variable. Now, the busy technologists must not only locate but also remember to attach every important piece of patient documentation - a new process that is inevitably susceptible to human error.

As technology transforms the work of healthcare, the key pieces that must be identified are the repetitive, manual steps that can benefit from automation. As new solutions create changes in the care delivery process, the changes to the human aspect of things must be accounted for if organizations are to maintain and improve workflow.

In the above instance, rather than requiring technologists to manually locate and attach important patient information, new systems and solutions should be capable of automatically sending the necessary documents to radiologists and remove the potential for human error.

Technology can and should be built to overcome the areas of error created by the human factor, to ensure both efficiency in workflow and quality in care delivery. The jump from film and paper to a primarily digital healthcare system was significant progress. But we won’t see the full potential of our advances if many of our old, manual processes are replicated digitally, in the form of several clicks having to be navigated by our care providers. We must continuously develop our solutions to be as effective as possible and, by extension, make the humans delivering care better at what they do.

I myself am a fan of the newest technologies and the latest that gadgetry has to offer, so I got my hands on the Google Glass as soon as I could. In using it, I found myself fascinated with what it could do – and then even more excited to see the capabilities of the Google Glass five years from now. Similarly, in healthcare we must always imagine the greater potential of our newest technologies. Because providing the best solutions in the industry will never be attributed to organizations who view their latest innovations as finished products – the quality will be reserved for those who see endless room for smart, nimble improvements to the ways technology can help patient care.