The Art of the Possible Practical: Five Lessons for Navigating the Journey to a Digital Hospital

The following is a guest article by Richard Scully from Atos.

While the vision of the Digital Hospital has been much talked about in health systems all over the world, relatively few organizations have yet realized it. Yet the realities of delivering a digital hospital are less about purchasing the high-tech of tomorrow, and more about harnessing what you already have today.

Rapidly evolving technologies, together with Covid-19, demographic and economic impacts, are changing hospitals all over the world. With ageing infrastructure in some countries and an almost universal demand for more beds, hospital executives and governments are rethinking their strategy and create hospitals without borders. Now more than ever, they need to find innovative ways to optimize inpatient and outpatient settings, connect with patients and citizens, and accelerate digital transformation.

What is a digital hospital?

Even the definition of a digital hospital can vary depending on who you ask. At Atos, we see the implementation of a digital hospital as follows:

  • Optimize, redesign and/or build new provider processes, management systems and facilities by enabling an underlying digitized networking infrastructure of interconnected assets
  • Orchestrate data and workflow via artificial intelligence to coordinate valuable services and insights which were not previously possible in order to meet the Quadruple Aim of delivering better patient experience, better health outcomes, lower costs of care and better staff experiences.
* Source: digital.ahrq.gov

Stages of evolution

Most health systems and organizations are still early in their evolution of digital hospitals for a number of reasons. Firstly, creating a digital hospital demands considerable financial and emotional investment; the optimization and orchestration process is complex and it takes a long time.

Secondly, the focus of organizations in creating a digital hospital should not be on technology or shiny point solutions. Rather, it is about the needs of people; and it requires a concerted, agile, end-to-end transformation journey that brings people along at every stage. This starts with early iterations of the digital strategy, then moves through to orchestration of data and technology, together with the associated organizational and cultural change.

Five key things we’ve learned

Working with healthcare providers, Atos’ experience has underlined the importance of five lessons for any digital hospital initiative.

  1. Make it truly collaborative from the outset. Everyone has a stake in digital transformation – cross-function and involving subject matter experts within the hospital, of course, but also with external subject matter experts, partners and exemplar organizations.
  2. Invest in developing a holistic vision and staged roadmap. With clear mile-markers for the journey, this should include not only design principles and guidance on technology and data, but also personas and journeys of future patients and staff, with leverage of best practices and exemplars.
  3. You may already have a lot of the data you need. Hospitals are already inundated by digital signals, from air-conditioning, heating, lighting and elevators, to blood plasma chillers, smart beds and MRI machines. Creating a digital hospital is a question of harnessing that data in the right way.
  4. Harness artificial intelligence and machine learning early, with proofs of value to generate actionable insights that deliver identified and measurable outcomes, aligned with the Quadruple Aim.
  5. Stay agile and continually iterate your staged roadmap. Make sure you stay highly flexible and modular in program design, governance and implementation, so you can address your top priorities across strategic, operational and tactical opportunities, always in collaboration with your stakeholders.

Orchestrating and evolving data and technologies

Once the roadmap has been defined, orchestration and curation of technologies and data will cover the full range of capabilities, from those intrinsic to the day-to-day running of the hospital through to advanced functionality such as gaining data insights from AI Data Orchestration, for example: for Workflows and Patient Outcome Optimization; for Virus Containment and Prevention; and for Facility Management Optimization.

Every roadmap is different and we’ve worked with organizations to evolve pre-existing hospitals into digital hospitals and for developing brand new, custom-built digital hospitals, including with a leading public health institution in the UK rolling out 40 new hospitals.

Collaboration and determination

Delivering on the ideal of the digital hospital is demanding, with significant consultation and due diligence required. Yet it is undoubtedly a critical step to deliver the digitally advanced, integrated comprehensive and smart hospitals of tomorrow.

In many ways, the future is already here and Covid-19 has accelerated the shift to digital while placing intense pressures on hospitals who need to build agile recovery plans. And as ever in healthcare, with collaboration, innovation and determination healthcare organizations are already making major breakthroughs. This is a journey that we are all on – partners, patients and every part of the health ecosystem. Let’s move forward, together.

About Richard Scully

Richard Scully has over two decades of leading digital healthcare transformation projects and teams while at Qualcomm, Verizon, IBM Watson and now Atos. Currently Richard is a global portfolio executive leading an international strategy team to create and deliver the next generation of provider/consumer health omnichannel experiences.

About Atos

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 110,000 employees and annual revenue of € 12 billion. European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high performance computing, the group provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 73 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services and products, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized digital for its clients.

The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

Atos is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

   

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