Adapting to new ways of working - leveraging the opportunities of new technologies in healthcare
Adapting to new ways of working - leveraging the opportunities of new technologies in healthcare
Healthcare organisations globally are grappling with a number of demands and pressures, and one of the foremost challenges within healthcare is the global workforce shortage, where the numbers are staggering in additional staff needed to support patient care.
A potential solution to this is understanding and leveraging the extraordinary advances being made in assisted or ‘artificial’ intelligence, robotics and forms of automation. Whilst the challenges linked to these aspects are, of course numerous, one could choose to focus on the opportunities and how this technology could be revolutionary for both patients and staff within healthcare. Below we explore some of the opportunities of integrating new technologies in healthcare and how they support the drive to manage the global workforce challenges health systems are facing.
Opportunities in AI
As Healthcare costs continue to take an increasing proportion of national wealth in countries all over the world, it is requiring both health system, and provider institution leaders, with the task of finding ways to deliver care more efficiently and remove transactional tasks from staff through digital adoption, both in patient-facing settings and corporate support functions. In aspiring to create conditions where the delivery of care can guarantee year-on-year cost reductions, the productivity gains that AI and technology offer are too important to ignore. However, the current knowledge and confidence of leaders to identify and exploit these opportunities remains inconsistent and more needs to be done to level up digital understanding and translate that into tangible deliverables.
Developments in Digital transformation are occurring at an unfathomable pace and for many, the knowledge gap is daunting. Many are still at a very experimental phase of AI integration whilst most now have come to recognise that AI can be amazingly powerful to help achieve error-free healthcare, deliver a step change in productivity, improve patient experience and create a more rewarding working environment for staff, allowing them to work at the top of their license.
Focus on quality and patient-facing interactions
Post Covid, it seems clear that healthcare staff can not run any faster. A big part of the solution to manage future demands is therefore directly linked to technology. This is not just about automating areas such as diagnostics and clinical decision support, but the end-to-end automation of everything from medicines management to procurement. Automation has huge potential to support progress in reducing support costs and shift resources to patient-facing roles. AI is often pitched in the media as the rise of the impersonal machine, but in the context of healthcare, it should liberate staff to spend more time with patients, on the interactions that really matter and where a personal touch is essential. In a sense utilizing AI in an optimal way will allow us to instead strengthen the human elements needed to achieve the type of healthcare we envision.
Research by McKinsey indicates that roughly a third of healthcare and social care activities could be automated . For many years we have heard excuses made claiming that healthcare is a ‘people business’ which doesn’t lend itself to automation. This research demonstrates that this simply isn’t true.
Adapting to new ways of working
Embracing technology means we need to think creatively about how we attract and reward what is quickly becoming mission critical scarce technology staff. We also need to start working differently.
Current working patterns trap clinicians into performing administrative functions which are far below their professional capacity.
Well over half of doctors, nurses and other clinicians report being over-skilled for the tasks they are asked to perform. In the UK, a government review found that the proportion of a clinician’s time spent on administration varied between 15 and 70%.
We train Junior doctors/residents as medics and then use them as clerks. It is common for junior doctors to be spending half or even more of their time performing tasks which could be largely or completely automated, such as compiling discharge summaries when patients leave hospital.
Care pathways need to be redesigned to digitise and automate where possible, break down human activities into individual tasks and then allocate those tasks to the most appropriate member of the team.
Review the many tasks that do not require nursing or medical degrees. A new cadre of care workers whose role it is to support clinicians, is needed.
This task-oriented, digital-first approach will challenge traditional professional boundaries and hierarchies, but it is essential if healthcare systems are to embrace technology and begin to find solutions to the workforce crisis beyond constantly saying ‘we need more staff’. We need to make progress in how we use the skills of healthcare workers to best effect.
Frank McKenna
Global Managing Director, Healthcare & Higher Education
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“A more task-oriented, digital-first approach will challenge traditional professional boundaries and hierarchies, but it is essential if healthcare systems are to embrace technology and begin to find solutions to the workforce crisis beyond constantly saying ‘we need more staff’. ”
Examples to inspire
At Alumni Global we have seen extensively how healthcare partners across different sectors and geographical regions are making progress. Below are some examples of how technology is being used to improve access, quality and productivity in healthcare.
Seha Virtual Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
To support the many remote communities across the Kingdom, the hospital is linked virtually to 130 hospitals around the country, bringing telemedicine and digital health within reach of many citizens. It can monitor hundreds of patients in real-time on huge banks of screens connected to remote patients in other hospitals and provides support for numerous specialities including critical care. Using just 75 physicians it has the capacity to support over 500,000 patients annually.AI algorithms such as medical imaging analysis are routine. Electronic platforms support doctors in performing complex surgery.
Ambulance Victoria - management of paramedics in the Australian state of Victoria.
Ambulance Victoria provides emergency response to over 5.8 million people in an area of more than 227,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of Austria. It uses machine learning, predictive analytics, root cause analysis and data mining to give paramedics real-time information.Healthcare data is combined with information such as weather and traffic patterns to provide contextual data to determine where resources are best allocated and the routes paramedics should take. Having reached the patient, they are told the best hospital to go to, considering issues such as drive time, hospital congestion and patient needs.
NHS UK
Trialling an AI system that has been able to increase the number of patients recovering from stroke with little or no disability from 16% to 48%.The Brainomix e-Stroke system, private company backed by leading Healthtech investors
This system has been used for 111,000 people experiencing a suspected stroke. Early analysis indicates that it reduces the time between diagnosis and treatment from 140 to 61 minutes, by providing real-time decision support to doctors in interpreting brain scans.
Delivering change
To leverage the opportunities available in new technologies and combat the global shortage of healthcare workers, massive organisational development is needed. To succeed more multidisciplinary teams working to solve complex problems are needed, our workforce and our leadership need to be equipped with the skills to work effectively and confidently with the latest technology, to deliver change governance structures can be simplified and steps taken to remove conflicting policies and priorities.
The senior healthcare leadership community, with the support of their Boards and partners such as the Foundations and Health Charities, need to understand what is required to make transformation happen and create an overarching strategy that is shaped to predict, prepare and plan for the future.
Did you know that Alumni Global is dedicated to using our expertise to supporting clients as they strategically review their business models to become more digitally enabled and people centric. Our mission is simple, bringing forward leaders that can leverage people, culture, and technology to achieve safer outcomes, increase organisational effectiveness and build more diverse teams that drive culture and performance committed to patient excellence. Our expertise and networks cover public, private, and academic healthcare providers, payers, and regulators on a global basis, from Stockholm to Sydney, to Dublin and Doha. Wherever you are based, we can support your search for talent through one of our highly experienced teams.
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