The delivery of healthcare has been profoundly impacted by advances in IT over the past few years. While there has been some improvement in efficiencies for the delivery of care, billing, and other core business functions, there are still some challenges to overcome. From silos of information and disconnected systems, inefficiencies in workflow not only impact the delivery of care but the patient-provider relationship as well. Across the board, many organizations are discovering that constructive change starts with the most fundamental concept: the workflow. By implementing simplified and efficient workflows, organizations are addressing current issues and maximizing the benefits for the future of healthcare IT.
The goal for healthcare IT today is to “help streamline operations and help healthcare organizations become more proactive, predictive, and resilient,” noted Jonathan Alboum, Federal Chief Technology Officer for ServiceNow, in a recent forum on the future of healthcare IT. He added that while at the same time health care organizations need to, “provide capabilities to the providers and staff of these organizations to really unlock productivity.”
To do this, organizations are taking advantage of low code customizable workflows that don’t involve complex coding, enabling people with programming knowledge to tailor workflows according to specific job needs or feedback from frontline users. Alboum urged healthcare systems, agencies, and other organizations to “put those technologies in their hands, let them build things that work for the patient. You combine that with these ideas of hyper automation, where we can take low code, plus AI plus RPA, and other kinds of very, very powerful technologies and put them together in ways that can digitize and automate end to end processes.”
For example, The Veterans Affair’s Office of Information and Technology introduced an employee portal that consolidated access to services. They have created more automated, self-service capabilities through software asset management, so clinicians can focus on helping patients rather than handling basic IT tasks like PIV exemptions and password resets.
Streamlining tasks can also move beyond organizational walls to enable better collaboration between organizations. The National Institutes of Health collaborated with the National Cancer Institute to develop a portal for doctors and researchers to securely share data and patient samples with the intention of driving collaboration to further the understanding which genetic factors contribute to more severe COVID-19 symptoms. Grasping the magnitude that this shared information could provide, the portal was set up and fully operational in under a month.
Healthcare organizations are turning to low code tools to be more responsive to frontline users, like providers and patients, and delivering the workflows they need to streamline administration, deliver care, drive collaboration, and turn research into treatments. By focusing on how to adapt workflows to healthcare IT leaders are taking bold steps that will deliver more innovative healthcare for all. Hear more about the future of healthcare IT from Jonathan Alboum and other experts here.
