It comes as no surprise that people are open to the use of technology in healthcare and have even come to expect it. Consumers prefer tech for tasks such as paying their health insurance bills, monitoring health metrics, and searching for physician ratings and reviews. But despite all the progress being made, it has yet to revolutionize healthcare in the same way that other industries, such as travel, banking and entertainment, have excelled with digital service delivery.
And yet, technology itself isn’t the problem.
Instead, the barriers often have nothing to do with technology. Promoting an overdue transformation starts with people. It will require stakeholders to play specific roles in the adoption and implementation of technology solutions. Examples of key stakeholder roles include:
1. Governments instigating systemwide digital health projects.
Support infrastructure, standards, and regulations that reinforce healthcare delivery needs, data exchange, and open innovation platforms or ecosystems.
Encourage education & training for healthcare / medical personnel to develop technology skills.
2. Payers and health standards boards adapting their models of reimbursement and accreditation.
Evaluate how alternative providers and new market entrants can provide services to customers.
Invest in IT infrastructure on which third-party providers can innovate.
3. Healthcare providers focusing on tangible value to patients, clinicians and staff.
Set clear standards for interoperability from the start.
Develop a clear strategy and prioritized use cases that add the most value for patients, clinicians and staff.
Invest in the right workforce-skill mix to spur technology breakthroughs. Provide staff education and training to develop tech capabilities.
Expand resources for existing pilot projects, rather than starting new ones, when timing is out of sync with budget cycles.
Develop a portfolio approach towards digital innovation (either internally or by partnering with solution providers). Introduce culture changing initiatives that promote uptake of these innovations.
4. Solution providers adopting partnership strategies that encourage long-term performance outcomes.
Partner with providers, payers and academia to establish precedents for digital innovations.
Develop central innovation budgets that create systemwide benefits across the entire cycle of care (as opposed to decentralized dept. budgets that lead to underinvestment).
Offer flexible, clinically validated solutions that recognize incentives and ability to create disruptive changes.
Each of these in isolation cannot drive large-scale transformation. But stakeholders working in concert is where the magic happens.
Consider a number of countries that are developing open innovation platforms. Finland, for example, has built a partnership of several organizations that have created a bundle of digital healthcare services, including personal EHRs, a prescription service, a pharmaceutical database, a patient-data repository and archives. Denmark’s OpenTeleHealth encourages third-party vendors to develop new applications.
In the U.S., barriers such as culture, organizational structure and governance remain a challenge. It will take a concerted effort among stakeholders to get past those barriers to drive healthcare’s tech transformation.
Source: Gareth L. Jones et al. McKinsey & Co. June 2019. “Promoting an overdue digital transformation in healthcare.” Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/promoting-an-overdue-digital-transformation-in-healthcare?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=9d64d371b9c34da0b3c0c8b7ce0c79a0&hctky=10115817&hdpid=a4dbf5bb-040c-4057-961a-ee591ea1ffb0