If acquiring new health-IT technology is on your blueprint for the New Year, the critical factors for success are less about acquisition decisions than implementation, says Molly Coye, founder and CEO of the Health Technology Center, a non-profit education and research organization. HealthTech provides technology forecasts and decision-making tools for nearly 25 percent of the nation’s hospitals, as well as nonprofit health plans and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. As a member of the Institute of Medicine, Coye co-authored major reports such as “Crossing the Quality Chasm” and is on the board of trustees of the American Hospital Association and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), among other credentials. She serves on Google Health’s advisory board.
DHP: How can organizations make the right technology decisions in such a complex and rapidly changing environment?
Coye: There are a few pieces that can be helpful. One of them is a clear understanding of the integration of your technology strategy with your overall business strategy. Very often health care provider organizations, unfortunately, make decisions around clinical technologies separately from the information technologies. It is important to integrate and relate both of them very closely into the overall business strategy of organization.
Another issue is that most organizations never consider are some of the relatively less expensive investments that cross over between IT and clinical. Because they’re not expensive enough, they don’t hit the threshold for capital planning to kick them into the strategic system-like decision process. So decisions around, for example, an IT productivity management and communication system, video interpretation system, or clinical technologies — technologies that are not as expensive as, say, large imaging systems just simply don’t get addressed and opportunities are missed.
Another issue is the process within a health provider system. In many cases it’s highly fragmented and there is very little consistency across the pieces of the large or small hospital system. You need to have a process that is relatively clearly understood and there needs to be a high degree of transparency so that clinicians and staff in the system can understand why some technologies are advanced and others are not. This is a cultural goal. It often takes several years to develop a process and have it be widely understood within the organization so real traction can be had.
