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By Raman Padmanabhan, SVP and CIO, Xerox Commercial Healthcare
Change is coming: Very soon, healthcare quality will no longer be defined by good doctors and well-equipped hospitals.
Instead, it’ll be more about storing and analyzing information, improved connectivity, and increased collaboration. It’ll be about catalyzing scientific breakthroughs and increasing speed to treatment.
But transformation is never an easy journey...
These are revolutionary changes—aimed at delivering higher quality, more accessible and affordable healthcare. Although IT enables each of these changes, it isn’t as simple as finding the appropriate hardware architecture or operating system.
We are fundamentally altering the healthcare experience.
Oh. The Humanity?
We can’t just flip a few switches and expect to ease into a new era of healthcare. With any significant change, it’s the human element that determines the widespread acceptance and use of transformative technology.
Video: Xerox Reduces Storage Spend by 85%
Take, for example, the healthcare industry’s shift from paper to electronic health records (EHRs). Our 2013 EHR survey found that less than a third of U.S. adults surveyed want their medical records to be digital—more than 80% cited privacy and confidentiality concerns.
These figures illustrate the continued resistance and slow progress in acceptance of EHRs since we launched this annual survey, four years earlier. (Even though most respondents believe EHRs will reduce costs and improve quality.)
But don’t just take our word for it: A number of peer-reviewed articles about healthcare IT support our results, confirming that progress in modernizing health technology is slow.
So What Does It All Mean?
If there’s one thing this research tells us, it’s that you should never develop or implement technology outside its human context.
I'm still an engineer at heart, so I’ll be the first to admit that I love to play with cool technology. But you can’t deploy technology just for the sake of it.
People’s tolerance for change can only be pushed so far before they start to resist. This isn’t because we’re unreasonable or intractable, but because we’re creatures of habit.
Every person has a different level of patience—a threshold for disruption, if you will. So you have to figure out how far and how fast you can push any transformative effort. This is true whether you’re trying to improve a team, transform an organization, or change the world.
I’m not suggesting that we can’t or shouldn’t use technology to expand the horizons of medicine. But we can help simplify and accelerate transformation by balancing these three critical variables in our approaches:
• People
• Processes
• Technology
Notice that it’s the word people that comes first in that list—with technology last.
To add human-centered insights to IT solutions, we use ethnography and other social-science methods, to observe and analyze customer work practices and needs.
Understanding how our customers use technology—or don’t use it—is a gateway to innovation. It’s helping us simplify the way our healthcare customers work, and aids in their adoption and acceptance of transformative technology and processes.
The Bottom Line
For IT and IT services to continue to advance and transform the healthcare system, technology professionals need to keep this fundamental truth in perspective:
People—even more so than the technology itself—will ultimately drive or stall the journey to a more efficient and compassionate healthcare system.
We must urgently get patients and practitioners committed to this effort. It’s just as important as implementing the right IT solutions—perhaps more so.
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• Healthcare: Radical Change Needs The Human Touch ~ @XeroxCorp
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