Healthcare has traditionally been a slow-to-change industry and the initial rapid innovation during the COVID-19 public health emergency accelerated needed transformation. But the pace of change has become a headwind for many health systems. How fast is too fast?
“While we are used to being on the edge of new digital innovations, and clinical decision support is something that we’ve been doing for a long time, but not necessarily at the pace and extent that AI allows us to do so,” said Umberto Tachinardi, MD, senior vice president and chief health digital officer at UC Health in Cincinnati, said during an interview with “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “One of the challenges that comes from AI is the speed and the size and the complexity of newer things. While they may not be in isolation completely new, they are coming in such a big volume and so fast that it’s a challenge. We need to learn how to deal with that avalanche of new things coming at a very fast speed.”
Given the pace of change and increasingly complex digital ecosystem, CIOs and digital leaders are building an IT infrastructure that is much more plural, diverse and bigger than before. Leaders need sophisticated governance to manage the different origins, technologies and vendors on the back and front end of the process.
They’re also seeing increased adoption by the team, and each AI-driven project yielding great results births many others.
“Everyone now in the organization feels they can be helped by some of those advancements,” said Dr. Tachinardi. “That becomes another challenge. How do you govern the prioritization of deployment, acquisition, introduction of those technologies, because everyone wants everything. We have a huge demand in front of us, and [we have to] educate people in this new digital literacy world.”
UC Health created a Digital Council composed of stakeholders from across the organization to provide guidance on where to focus digital efforts and the right speed for implementation. They set priorities and sequence the evolution of digital transformation.
“One of the critical components is to have a complete, broad engagement from the organization,” he said. “The other one is to make sure that we evaluate the knowledge of people about the things we are putting in to help them so they understand that nothing is 100% perfect or infallible. Things will fail here and there, and they may produce wrong outcomes. We obviously want tools that will produce the least amount of that possible, close to zero, but it’s important that people understand that and they continue to reason and pay attention and monitor how those technologies are behaving.”
Amit Patel, MSN, chief nursing informatics officer at Tampa General Hospital, also sees the rapid pace of change as a challenge moving forward.
“It’s about the technology and pace of change right now, especially with the AI space,” he said. “Things are rapidly changing, but overall with all of the cybersecurity concerns and the infrastructure pieces that a lot of platforms depend on, it’s really just trying to keep up with that and making sure we’re agile enough to change when we need to. We’re going to continue to grow and move forward at a rapid pace.”
The IT shop has to keep up with the changes at the system level, whether it’s acquiring new hospitals, building outpatient centers or providing more care remotely. They have to make sure the end users understand the technology and why changes are beneficial.
“Not everyone loves change, but it’s a necessary evil in this day and age, especially with our IT infrastructure pieces,” he said.
But leaders can ease the transition with appropriate communication and education.
“If you communicate with your team members, even down to the lowest levels, they understand the vision, the strategy, and just keeping that communication channel open, they’ll understand the reason for change and there won’t be as much pushback,” he said. “A good example of that is right now we’re really looking at our telehealth infrastructure and seeing what we can really set up for the future. We’ve got some disparate systems at the moment and how do we set ourselves up for the future so that as the technology and environment changes, we can transform with it without having to rip everything out and start over again.”