3 Game-Changing Shifts For A Future-Ready Healthcare IT Strategy
By Frank Negro, Global Practice Leader, Strategy and Consulting, Dell Services Healthcare & Life Sciences
One thing is clear about the future of IT in healthcare: it’s totally unpredictable. And for that reason, healthcare organizations must ready themselves for anything.
Rapid technology advancements, shifting regulations, and competitive pressures make it difficult for IT professionals to plan their architecture even a few years in advance, let alone a decade into the future. Instead, building a future-ready IT infrastructure is not about placing big bets on specific technologies, but more about changing the way the organization approaches its strategic technology planning and decision-making.
To prepare for an uncertain future, healthcare companies need an IT infrastructure that is stable and sustainable, yet flexible enough to assimilate new technologies as they emerge. But beyond that, they need a shift in organizational thinking about how they evaluate new technologies and make them a part of their everyday operations. The way I see it, this change should come to life in several ways.
Refocus The Strategy And Governance Process To Look Farther Into The Future
Most healthcare organizations have developed an IT governance function intended to align IT projects with the strategic goals of the company as a whole. That’s certainly important, but many of these efforts are too short-sighted. For example, an IT plan that looks at project work for the next three to five years may seem progressive, but most CIOs agree that healthcare IT already lags behind other industries by five to ten years.
Instead of being caught in a perpetual cycle of playing technology catch up, organizations would be better served by looking beyond near-term IT project needs and focusing more on the long-term strategy of the business as a whole. That means positioning to anticipate the next steps in the evolution of the industry — in terms of clinical care, government regulation, and the competitive landscape — and continuously aligning the IT strategy with how the larger organizational direction will need to change to meet these challenges. And whenever possible, the IT function will have to take the initiative to create its own future, rather than respond to what develops.
Restructure Technology Architecture And Processes To Better Enable Healthcare Delivery
IT represents a major expense for healthcare organizations, often around 6 percent of the total budget. But many healthcare executives still view IT as a pure cost-center, rather than a function that adds real value. As nearly every aspect of society — including healthcare — becomes increasingly technology-driven, IT has a profound responsibility to be more than a technology supplier and order-taker. It must be a strategic partner that can plan and implement business and clinical improvements with an increasing degree of agility and scalability.
To make that vision a reality, organizations should think less in terms of long-term capital investments in technology and instead adopt practices that enable change without loss of prior investments. That could include a focus on redeploying, reassigning or re-using IT resources as needs change, as well as moving more functions toward cloud-based, technology-as-a-service platforms.
Embrace Analytics And Security As Essential Capabilities
In the era of big data, IT professionals in various consumer-facing industries are met with a unique conundrum. People have come to expect that organizations will collect detailed information about them and use it to provide personalized services, yet they also expect that their sensitive data will be kept 100 percent secure. The same is true in healthcare, as patients look toward the medical advancements that big data can unlock, but are becoming increasingly concerned that patient records remain confidential. Thus, for IT organizations to meet the future needs of their healthcare stakeholders, they’ll need to be dual experts in data analytics and security.
As for gathering and analyzing data, the greatest challenge may be finding a way to decrease the noise-to-signal ratio. We need to stop providing more data and develop tools to filter the mountains of available data to identify and capitalize on the patient data that is clinically useful and timely.
From a security standpoint, keeping data safe from prying eyes will be paramount, especially as we move toward clinical and business structures that require more information sharing among participants. It will also be increasingly difficult, as the underworld of cyber criminals grows larger and more sophisticated all the time. But IT will have to find the necessary balance between protecting patient information and rendering it completely inaccessible.
These three major shifts may come faster to some healthcare organizations than others. Understandably, the larger the ship, the longer it takes to change course. But the principals remain virtually the same, whether for large hospital systems or small single-office practitioners. Without a doubt, information technology will define the future of the healthcare industry, and the IT department must be prepared for whatever that future might bring.