Jonah Aburrow-Jones, Senior Vice President International of The HCI Group talks to Highland Marketing at EHI Live 2014 about the benefits that technology can offer to help providers find new and smarter ways to deliver integrated healthcare services.
The HCI Group leadership shares bold and creative thinking for your healthcare IT journey
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Q: How do you see technology being a key enabler to help address the main challenges facing healthcare?
A: Trusts nowadays, healthcare organisations, whether it’s in the UK or beyond the UK, have to look at this as not just simply an IT project but a technology project or even a clinical project. They’ll look at it as being an organisational change, a transformation project. The classical way that hospitals look at putting in technology, whether it’s software or something else, is you have a start, a middle and an end to a project. The problem being that when the IT department puts in that system and the project ends, who’s then responsible actually for seeing the benefits then start to be realised. And it’s only at the point of the system being implemented and going live that people actually start to see the benefits. So when you actually then incorporate it much more into being a transformational change project, the whole organisation is actually accountable in different ways to driving those benefits out on an ongoing basis.How do you see technology being a key enabler to help address the main challenges facing healthcare?
Q: What would you recommend for healthcare organisations embarking on a new healthcare IT journey?
A: It certainly can’t be an IT project any more. And I know that IT pushes to have heavy clinical engagement in projects nowadays, whether it’s stakeholders, whether you call them champions, it doesn’t really matter. But that engagement as such is only part of the story. So, you know, when you go and talk to an organisation nowadays, you need to talk about change, because when you go and put an integrated EHR into an organisation, it doesn’t just affect the clinicians, the nursing staff, schedulers, people in finance. In fact it will affect everybody, whether it’s a porter, you know, somebody frankly even working in the canteen. It changes the whole environment people work in. And from that perspective, you know, when you’re talking to different departments, you need to look at the impact on staff, staff motivation. And people, you know, look at a big system like this and a lot of the words that get banded about are efficiency, productivity. Unfortunately a lot of people look at that as meaning, does that impact my job? Yes, it might impact your job. It doesn’t mean you’re going to lose it at all. So yeah, it just goes back to the work about the changing transformation. Change management is a key part of this, you know, understanding and mapping out the workflows and the impact on your organisation from the very earliest stage. So we’re looking at business cases – sometimes even as part of the outline business case, even the SOC, that’s the point where you need to start considering some of these things.
Q: What are the benefits technology can offer for improved healthcare?
A: I suppose the words are overused in terms of productivity and efficiency, but I think the bigger aspect of it is not just simply looking at being able to see more patients, picking up on preventing more mistakes, improving safety, but I think it’s also talking about potential, you know. When people put an EHR in – and this has been commented on by the likes of Cambridge just recently, them going live. One of the things that immediately starts to be seen is people start to see the potential of what can be done within the future. I didn’t realise it could do that, you know. Could I do that? And people sort of start to see the potential. And that’s the true value. It’s not just simply what you can do today. It’s what you can do next week, next month, next year and so forth. So you could take advantages of the changes in technology, changes in clinical practice, things like genomics.
