4 Strategic Considerations for Digital Hospital Transformation

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4 Strategic Considerations for Digital Hospital Transformation

The following is a guest article by Kaeli Tully, Healthcare Systems and Solutions Engineer at Intel

In the quiet hours of the night, hospital executives toss and turn, grappling with the daunting reality of staffing shortages that plague their institutions. Challenges like these fuel passion and ingenuity for innovation and drive the community to harness the power of technology to find fit-for-purpose and impactful solutions. Hospitals are working closely with healthcare and life science ecosystems to collaborate on new solutions – beginning with data management.

Digital Hospitals as Data Engines

Digital Hospitals harness AI and analytics within their connected infrastructure to turn data from devices and workflows into actionable insights. 

Operating Rooms (ORs), intensive care units (ICUs), emergency rooms (ERs), and laboratories of a bustling hospital, along with all patient and provider touchpoints, are rich with data. This readily available information can be captured, analyzed, and leveraged in a digital hospital. 

Implementing AI, IoT, edge computing, and other innovations through digital transformation (DX) efforts can help hospital executive teams improve patient and provider experiences.

Key Challenges in Digital Hospital Transformation

A digital hospital is one of the most demanding DX-proving grounds imaginable: it is a perfect storm of need, opportunity, and risk that typically plays out against a daily backdrop of life-or-death stakes. These institutions are integrating new tools such as AI imaging, edge computing, and lab automation to provide more efficient and personalized patient care. It must all be done to the exacting standards of regulatory requirements, insurance coding, and clinicians working in high-volume, high-pressure, and high-cost environments. 

Managing this transformation requires meticulous planning, starting with a thorough requirements-gathering phase. This stage provides the opportunity for hospital DX teams to make a thorough assessment of the current conditions and pain points. This is an exercise DX teams should perform thoroughly. This phase could be informed by inputs, like the latest industry trends, patient survey data, and interviews with medical teams who understand the clinical and administrative workflows and challenges. 

This initial step is crucial for understanding the current needs and will help provide clarity on where strategic and impactful solutions can be deployed. It’s at this point that the team can explore technology solutions that address the most pressing needs of healthcare providers and patients.

From there, transformation teams need to break down identified information silos and capture data from various sensors, devices, and digital assets. The resulting data captured can then be connected and analyzed locally via edge computing or in the cloud for improved visibility into care, resource utilization, and better management of fluctuating caseloads. Throughout this process, a strategy that leverages multiple security measures to protect an organization’s assets is needed to prevent system compromises, protect sensitive patient data, and keep digital hospitals in compliance with industry standards and regulations.

The above steps are easier said than done, especially considering the slim operating margins that many hospitals operate within. This financial pressure intensifies the need to justify investments and select modernization projects that offer the most significant economic benefits. This pressure to make the best strategic investments is amplified further for public sector providers dealing with mass volumes of patients and data where legacy systems and funding gaps are more common. 

4 Strategic Priorities to Follow 

These conditions can help modernization teams ensure that the right strategic priorities inform their transformation playbooks to guide the planning, implementation, deployment, and ongoing maintenance of a digital hospital DX effort. Here are four considerations to keep in mind:

Target Key Areas of Impact

Choose modernization targets that will make the most difference and impact in transforming hospital operations, return on investment, and delivering patient care. These targets may include modernizing capabilities for general diagnostics, anesthesia, EHR, or other multi-department systems (e.g. ER, OR, and ICU). Other criteria for these targets include solutions that can aid in the most acute staffing shortages, such as patient monitoring systems that allow nurses to effectively care for more patients at a time.  

Invest in the Right Compute for the Job to Meet Performance, Security, and Cost Needs

The strategic use and freedom of hardware choice of edge to cloud technology is critical for optimizing workloads based on the application. The semiconductor and cloud service provider industry offers a range of computing options that can meet the diverse needs of DX efforts.

Select for Interoperability

The tight budgets that hospitals contend with means DX efforts typically need to deploy in stages and often on existing infrastructure. This makes interoperability and the flexibility to have combinations of new and existing technologies essential for success. 

Align Technology with Value-Based Care Models

While meeting the current needs of the hospital is top of mind, we are aware of the shift in procedure coding that’s driving value-based care approaches. How procedures are coded and billed to insurance should also factor into the DX strategy, and technology investments should consider this shift in the industry.

Reaping the Benefits of Digital Hospital Transformation 

Backed with the right strategic priorities, a well-implemented digital hospital transformation creates the opportunity for tremendous ROI for healthcare organizations that are constantly under pressure to do more with less, while also improving patient and provider experiences. Streamlined workflows and a more secure data architecture translate into reduced costs, stronger compliance, and better patient experiences. And perhaps, we all can get better sleep.

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