Building patient trust and approaching operations from a consumer-centric perspective are among the most important principles when engineering a healthcare organization's total digital transformation.
Michael Reagin, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer of Norfolk, Va.-based integrated delivery network Sentara Healthcare, outlined the four guiding principles of digital transformation during an Oct. 10 keynote address at the Becker's Hospital Review Health IT + RCM conference in Chicago.
Those principles include:
- Building a trusted relationship with patients and members, especially by offering total transparency in the use of their data.
- Approaching transformation from the perspective of the consumer, rather than from a more traditional, internal healthcare perspective.
- Developing a robust ecosystem of partners whose digital solutions can be leveraged to improve care quality and delivery.
- Obtaining "sponsorship and advocacy" from leadership at all levels of the organization.
Digital transformation, according to Mr. Reagin, is now practically non-negotiable in healthcare, which is currently ripe for a disruption along the lines of what Uber, Airbnb and Netflix did for the transportation, hotel and media industries, respectively. This disruption is spurred by changing consumer expectations; consumers expect healthcare to keep up with the increased digitization of other industries such as banking and retail.
To meet those standards, healthcare organizations must set aside their own ideas of care delivery and listen instead to consumers. One of the "worst ideas" in the early stages of Sentara's digital transformation was the segregation of ideas that would deliver a concrete return on investment and those that fulfilled consumer needs and desires, Mr. Reagin shared.
"It's hard to get out of that mindset, but we have to deliver healthcare where the consumer wants it, when they want it and how they want it — not how we want it or how we think will be good for our business," he said.
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