What is Healthcare Digital Transformation?

Locked away in Chicago, Ed Marx races towards the final sprint to complete his latest publication, “Healthcare Digital Transformation”, a book he has co-authored with Paddy Padmanabhan set to release in May 2020. The HCI Group were pleased to be able to spend a few minutes with him to discuss his upcoming six-part webinar series ahead of its launch at the end of this month.

For over 20 years, Marx has served in both small community hospitals, as well as large global academic systems. He knows the challenges and opportunities faced in each environment, and prides himself on having the passion, energy and insights to help individuals and organizations ­accelerate success.

Marx served as a CIO for University Hospitals Health Systems, Texas Health Resources, NYC Health + Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic. These organizations cover multiple industry sectors (academic, religious, public health, research) nationally and internationally. In each case, technology has contributed materially to the organizations mission and vision.

In “Voices of Innovation”, Marx’s 2019 healthcare bestseller, he explored the best practices and potential outcomes of creating and sustaining a culture of innovation within healthcare organizations. Now, he has turned his sights to defining and outlining digital transformation, a current topic of great discussion and interest within the industry. Just as with the term innovation, there are an abundance of descriptions and explanations currently being used in the industry for digital transformation. As such, this is the first topic that Marx will tackle in part one of the Digital Unplugged webinar series.

“Digital transformation at its core is the evolution of technology to create amazing experiences. In the last few decades, we’ve heard such terms as eCommerce, eBanking, mobile technology, and even more recently The Cloud. This progression of focus and development has all been part of the natural evolution of technology. However, the main difference in more recent years, is the shift of focus on to the importance of “experience” to enable and improve business and clinical outcomes.

In the past, from a patient, employee, organizational, or even community perspective, we weren’t really all that concerned about experience. However, as it is now the main focus of the evolution of technology, organizations can find that they have a hard time adapting their technology to meet the demand for improved experiences, as it hasn’t been a focal point in its infrastructure previously.

There are two problems that healthcare IT leaders face when considering digital transformation in their organizations. Firstly, there is no clear definition. It is so nebulous a term, that people naturally find themselves asking “what does it actually mean” and “how do you do it?”. This naturally leads to the second problem – people are overwhelmed when they do try to define digital transformation and what it takes to get there. They assume that in order to digitally transform, you must be organized, you must have a firm technology foundation, you have to move to cloud, you have to be nimble and adept at speed and velocity… But this is not necessarily the case.

In this webinar series, we will not only cover “what is digital transformation” and give examples of how that has worked in real life, but we will walk you through how you implement this within your own company and provide you with a workable roadmap and plan. Using tried and tested methodology, we will share the working model of agile digital transformation, that you can then take and adapt within your own organization.”

To save your seat on the upcoming webinar Part 1: Digital Unplugged – “Digital Defined”, please visit our recent post with all the relevant links and registration information.

Part 1: Digital Defined | 30^th January 2020 | 8am & 5pm EST