While an incredible number of new technologies promise to help healthcare organizations improve efficiency and reduce costs, it can be difficult to make the necessary investments right now, as health systems struggle with both financial and staffing challenges. An alternative approach, being pursued by many health systems, involves maximizing the value of those investments that have already been made.
During the Becker's Hospital Review 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting, in a workshop session sponsored by Brightwork Health IT, Tabitha Lieberman, president of EHR and healthcare applications at Brightwork, discussed how rationalizing applications and fully utilizing existing technologies can be the foundation for greater innovation.
Four key takeaways were:
- Current technology trends are often incongruous with health systems' financial realities. Healthcare technology trends revolve around a constant influx of new and improved technologies. These include patient engagement platforms, RPA and automation, AI, virtual care, cloud and more. Meanwhile, today's financial realities include revenue shortfalls, declining margins and cost pressures due to inflation. "We have a major disconnect right now between the massive technical agenda that everyone is saying you must do and the financial realities from both the income and capital sides," Ms. Lieberman said.
- Rationalizing applications can pave the road to sustainability and value. According to Ms. Lieberman, health systems must look at their current tools and figure out which ones deliver the most value to their organization right now. She suggested rationalizing your applications, fully utilizing the applications in your current portfolio and innovating with healthcare smarts.
Doing so involves the following steps:
- Identify. Start by identifying which technologies you have. "That little app someone installed to do disease management is the type of thing that can get you," she said. "If you don't identify them, you can't secure them."
- Make a case. Each technology should have a proven, scalable value. "There's a significant cost avoidance opportunity out there," Ms. Lieberman said. "You can stop upgrading and securing unneeded solutions. You can't do things well and truly get adoption when you have a thousand apps."
- Execute. Once the decisions are made, getting operational alignment and staying the course is critical. "Remaining focused throughout application rationalization process and consolidating your portfolio to get the most value out of it isn't an overnight thing," she said.
- Sustain. Finally, make the change sustainable by engaging both operational and technical team members to be disciplined over time. Have a single database with all applications to have a "single source of truth," and develop roadmaps for all core technologies.
- Utilize the capabilities within your portfolio to generate greater value with little to no additional investment. Most health systems fail to do so. Lieberman shared the example of Epic's waitlist functionality, which allows patients to put themselves in a queue for earlier appointments. She noted that patients can get in, on average, 29 days earlier using this feature. "What buttons does that check on your strategic plan?" she asked. "Patient engagement, self-service and revenue. Yet only half of Epic customers fully use this functionality. Implement what you own for basically free, measure the efficacy, and then decide if you need to augment it with new technology."
- Application rationalization and maximizing current technologies lays a strong foundation for future transformation. "If you have a rationalized portfolio and are spending your core dollars on the things that are most important, you have a platform of which innovation can explode," Ms. Lieberman said.
By rationalizing applications and getting the most out of currently implemented technologies, health systems can build a strong, lean platform on which to build future innovation.