Health care leader interview: technology implementation and lessons learned

Nursing

Technology is crucial for healthcare delivery. Healthcare technologies range from those directly related to medical care interventions, namely medical technologies, and technologies that support and enhance care delivery and administration. It is the latter sector that healthcare leader and hospital administrator Jane Doe Francis became interested in after attending a seminar in 2008 on emerging technologies. The seminar inspired Francis to explore the different types of healthcare information technologies, informatics, and options for making administration more efficient, more effective, and error-free. Digital medical records became Francis's passion, and she has spoken about the importance of creating technology standards for American healthcare institutions. Consistency and reliability, as well as confidentiality and privacy, are key concerns for Francis and her colleagues in hospital administration. Currently, Francis is involved with a massive push toward cloud-based medical technologies that go beyond the electronic medical records database to include connectivity with medical technologies themselves and potential links with patient portals. Francis worked closely with MergeOne to provide the cloud-based service for her institution.

Francis's work echoes similar large-scale solutions designed to improve care delivery. For example, a coalition of healthcare leaders in the state of Massachusetts have teamed with innovators and investors to develop "a cloud to help hospitals house electronic medical records, writing software to keep patient data secure, connecting medical devices, analyzing big data for health care trends, and launching apps for consumers," (p. 1). Unfortunately, such innovations have yet to become standardized or consistently implemented. Francis worries, as do many healthcare administrators, that their investments will not pay off unless interest in similar technologies becomes widespread. The fear is that government decisions related to medical records might come too late, or in a way that conflicts with the investment of resources already made into the current system. Upgrading administrative functions to a cloud-based system should not necessarily entail the use of one standardized system. As Francis put it, each consumer has the opportunity to purchase whatever computer and operating system they choose. In the same way, hospitals should be able to choose which system they use, so long as the cloud is interactive. She uses the example of Dropbox as a cloud-based file storage and sharing system on the consumer level. When healthcare institutions can find meaningful solutions that match their individual needs but couple them with technologies that allow for seamless integration and communication, then healthcare will reach a quantum leap of progress, notes Francis.

General consensus in the healthcare leadership community is toward great leaps rather than the "incremental changes" (Carr, 2015). Incremental changes simply cannot respond to the growing need for improved quality of care. Patients are more frequently requesting access to digital portals and means by which they can take control of their medical data, notes Francis. Some patients expect to be able to manage their insurance online, receive answers to important healthcare questions, and interact with industry professionals (Leung, 2015). Investors have long been recognizing the potential for healthcare technologies to offer a return, and even when motives are financially driven, they can lead to measurable patient improvement outcomes (Leung, 2015). Healthcare services have become too complex to rely on the current, often arbitrary and haphazard, methods of management. The future rests with cloud-based systems that take advantage of the opportunity for information sharing and collaboration.