Finding your flow state to lead your organisation to the podium

eHealthNews.nz: Interoperability

Finding your flow state to lead your organisation to the podium

Sunday, 31 October 2021

Share |

FEATURE - Industry Innovation Article - Spark Health

As a nation, 2021 has been a year of few highlights. One that we can thankfully treasure is our achievement of the most successful Olympic games ever, with an array of gold, silver and bronze medals making their way back to Aotearoa.

In TVNZ’s coverage of the games, past Olympian cyclist Eddie Dawkins was asked when our winning cyclists would have started their preparations for this Olympics. His response – the last day of the games at Rio in 2016. As in the case of our medal winning athletes we in the health sector also need to start to plan today so that we have the building blocks in place to win tomorrow.

The desire to create a more digitised ecosystem, supporting and enabling better health outcomes, has been identified by most health organisations across NZ as the game changer in delivering better health outcomes and overall efficiencies of their business systems. But the elusive question is how do you shift from a digitally immature environment to a modern day integrated system without disruptions? Disruptions that cannot be tolerated when the organisation you operate literally deals with the life and wellbeing of people.

There are a myriad of easy to deploy, digital solutions and systems that can be leveraged to support the delivery of healthcare: this list will only continue to grow as we move into an environment post Covid where the patient and clinician relationship has changed significantly.

All of these new solutions have attractive ‘bells and whistles’ that could deliver a better patient experience or enable delivery of more effective care —but if your current information and data is not connected and you cannot transfer information from one system or repository to another, the benefits of these solutions are severely reduced.

Fuelling development
Olympic athletes use the foundation of nutrition to fuel their development and move them into a ‘flow state’. A state where they feel completely engaged, lose perception of time and are enabled to perform at extremely high levels.

In the same way, a health organisation embarking on the journey to build the digital health system of the future, needs to get their foundations right to get to their flow state in terms of automation— in this case connecting up existing systems, applications and solutions to enable the transfer of information and automation of business processes and ultimately reduction of dependence on pen and paper, spreadsheets and email.

There are various ways to tackle integration, and many where you can ‘patch’ together systems to build reports, algorithms and formula to pull information from one repository to another. However, to truly standardise integration across a whole organisation (and between organisations) an ‘integration platform as a service’ or iPaaS makes the connections much more efficient and widespread. Instead of basic connections from one to one, you can connect one to many.

Like there are evolving standards that athletes must meet to attend the Olympics an iPaaS must support current and emerging standards for information sharing across clinical and corporate systems.

Focusing on transformation
Integrating information and solutions doesn’t just benefit clinicians and front of house workers. By automating integrations your IT services are more able to focus on transformation projects: rather than just keeping the lights on, you will be able to focus on business objectives and requirements.

More importantly, an integrated platform is a bridge to create value for your stakeholders now through developing new innovative applications and utilising modern integration technology, whilst transitioning older systems onto the platform and without having to make a significant change overnight, causing unwanted interruptions. This approach gives you time to retire legacy systems at your own pace, once they are no longer required.

Data and information and the ability to use it effectively to inform decisions and work strategically is the decider of success in tomorrow’s arena. Those that don’t start making plans now risk being left behind, while also dealing with the added pressure of keeping ageing systems operational.

Five considerations for a winning data integration plan:

What is the strategic vision and what are the objectives for the future? Create a roadmap working towards where you want to head, what information will you need to inform your decisions and what will your team need to know/access to achieve their goals? For example is your key focus; creating new innovative apps, reducing operational cost, more secure migration of patient data, or freeing up time for clinical and non clinical staff?
What is your current applications or ‘silo’ map and what are you currently patching together to connect information today? Consider what information needs to be integrated and work with IT to identify where it is and how to connect it.
What is your current maturity level? Assess the levels of success of past IT programmes that were focused on transformation. Identify common contributing success factors and reasons for failure.
Think small and aim big – what are the smaller areas/functions of the business you can start to integrate to begin the journey towards better automation.
Find the right partner to support you through your journey. Do some research and find an organisation that understands the needs of your business and what you are trying to achieve. As with any solution, an integrated platform is only as good as the thinking behind it so you need to make sure you get the most out of your investment.

Working through these factors with different roles across the organisation will ensure the foundations are in place to connect areas of your business with each other and with the outside world. With this first step, you will be well on your way to gold.