Implementation of sustainable solutions is a pressing need for healthcare providers. Every digital transformation initiative aims for it at the beginning, but it is often less prioritised during the implementation. Are we incorporating sustainability requirements as part of minimum lovable/viable product releases?
Technology sustainability refers to the long-term viability and endurance of technological solutions, systems, or practices. It encompasses the ability of technology to remain relevant, effective, and functional over an extended period, considering factors such as evolving user needs, changing technological landscapes, economic considerations, environmental impact, and ongoing maintenance and support.
What if they come by default with a new platform?
In this blog post, we will delve into how an organisation can proactively meet sustainability demands, while also recognising and addressing the challenges that come with incorporating and prioritising these essential needs.
Rapid functionality prioritisation neglects sustainability, leading to long-term viability challenges
- Organisations excessively prioritise rapid inclusion of functionalities, neglecting sustainability requirements during transformation.
- Focus on adding features diminishes the importance of sustainability, shifting workload from legacy systems quickly.
- Solutions may become unsustainable, leading to the need for additional transformations or platform transitions.
- Failing to meet sustainable needs has far-reaching implications for health care providers.
- Implications include financial losses, increased maintenance costs, compliance issues, hindered efficiency and patient care.
- Damaged reputation, competitive disadvantage, hindered innovation, adaptability, and environmental harm may occur.
- Neglecting sustainability leads to recurring system breakdowns, higher operational expenses, and eroded customer trust.
- Difficulties in attracting new clients impact long-term viability in the market.
Challenges & Mitigations
Within this context, we encounter compelling reasons and foreseeable barriers that warrant consideration. In the following sections, I’ll delve into these challenges, offering a range of potential pathways to explore
Tempting to opt for ready to use solution:
Onboard a flexible platform that is customisable to address unique needs while leveraging common industry features for gaining a competitive advantage and ensuring sustainability.
- Challenge: While an off-the-shelf solution provides quick deployment, it often falls short in addressing unique workflows, specialised processes, and specific requirements that differ from one healthcare organisation to another.
- Mitigation:
- Organisations need to adopt a platform that offers a range of pre-built features and functionalities tailored for the healthcare domain while providing flexibility to configure for unique and innovative processes.
- This means that a significant portion of the platform comes ready-to-use, allowing for a quicker implementation (configuration & customisation) and reducing the time-to-value.
- It addresses the desire for an off-the-shelf product by providing essential tools for healthcare professionals to manage patient data, care plans, appointments, and more without starting from scratch.
- Salesforce Health Cloud:
- Salesforce Health Cloud gains a competitive edge in the competitive healthcare technology landscape due to its high customizability.
- Other off-the-shelf healthcare solutions may lack the flexibility needed to meet the diverse needs of different healthcare providers.
- Salesforce Health Cloud provides organisations the freedom to tailor the platform to their specific requirements.
- This level of customization enables Salesforce Health Cloud to effectively cater to a wide range of healthcare settings.
Limited client adoption of email and mobile apps in home health – Solution:
Leverage widely-used channels like SMS and WhatsApp to persuade new channel adoption
- Challenge(s):
- Limited use of email & mobile apps: In the home health sector, one of the significant challenges faced by providers is the limited acceptance of email and mobile apps among clients. Instead, clients prefer to visit the physical location or contact the customer centre for their needs.
- No direct control over adoption: Unfortunately, providers have no direct control over clients’ preferences for communication channels. Additionally, the financial burden of maintaining call centres is becoming unsustainable for many organisations.
- Mitigation:
- Start with messaging: The key missing element in this scenario is a compelling strategy to encourage clients to adopt digital channels and maximise their use, especially widely-used ones like SMS.
- Promote emails, Mobile Apps, Web portals: Introducing a 2-way SMS approach could prove effective in persuading clients to explore and utilise mobile apps or portals through provided links.
- Salesforce:
- Digital engagement add-on: Salesforce emerges as a valuable solution in this context, offering a seamless native digital engagement for popular communication channels like SMS and WhatsApp.
- Leveraging these capabilities can significantly enhance adoption rates, enabling providers to deliver more efficient and convenient services to their clients, ultimately leading to improved patient engagement and satisfaction in the realm of home health care.
Lack of operational rhythm in data governance processes:
Prioritise it for business owners and provide suitable platform support.
- Challenge(s):
- Organisations are struggling to establish an effective operational rhythm for their data governance process, aiming to take ownership of data elements, attributes, and their security and compliance features.
- Without conducting the orchestra of data governance, the instruments played by process owners would be out of sync, resulting in disharmony in compliance and accuracy. The absence of a conductor would lead to a lack of ownership and governance over data elements and attributes, causing the symphony of sustainable success to falter and lose its flawless resonance within the organisation
- Mitigation:
- This involves reserving and planning resources, allocating costs, and setting a consistent operational rhythm across various business functions. To achieve this, they appoint process owners responsible for data, ensuring compliance, acting as reliable data sources, and forming the foundation for data governance, followed by architectural governance and implementation.
- Owning and governing data elements and attributes is vital for meeting the business’s long-term sustainable needs.
- Salesforce:
- Salesforce facilitates the addition of compliance categories against each field through its customisable data model and metadata capabilities.
- Administrators can define specific compliance categories for individual fields, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Health Information (HIPAA), or Financial Data (PCI DSS).
- By associating compliance categories with fields, organisations can easily track and manage data based on its sensitivity and regulatory requirements.
Enable partner provider online portals:
Enable and prioritise easily accessible partner portals with widely used common features like referrals and invoices, while laying out a strategy to encourage adoption
- Challenge(s): Streamlining collaboration with third-party providers and digitising the process pose two fundamental challenges.
- Firstly, each provider has their unique approach right from handling referrals to invoice claims.
- Secondly, creating distinct partner experiences for different providers is complicated, considering factors like cost, time, and effort.
- Mitigation:
- Identifying a bare minimum feature that can work for all brokerage services is the key to get some traction.
- Secondly, lay out a strategy to adopt the portal, for example, enable them to log into the portal using their existing social media logins.
- Salesforce Health Cloud:
- Salesforce provides Partner Portals with specialised features within the Salesforce Health Cloud platform designed to facilitate collaboration and communication between healthcare providers and third-party service organisations.
- These portals allow healthcare providers, such as home care agencies or hospitals, to connect and work seamlessly with external partners, such as external service providers, laboratories, pharmacies, or medical equipment suppliers.
- The partner portals enable streamlined information sharing, including patient data, treatment plans, and progress updates, ensuring all involved parties have real-time access to relevant information.
Balancing Adoption of the New Platform’s User Experience with Creating Bespoke UIs:
Encouraging the use of native experience while considering bespoke UIs for unique processes
- Challenge:
- Many projects initially aim to leverage the platform’s native user experience, but they often end up developing numerous custom user interfaces due to resistance from super users and process owners.
- However, relying on bespoke UIs in the long run becomes challenging as they take more time to create and maintain, causing inconvenience with every change.
- Mitigation:
- User training typically starts after feature development, and if power users can familiarise themselves with the platform’s native experience from the start, it will positively impact how they perceive requirements and set expectations.
- Ultimately, this approach leads to better adoption rates and a more positive mindset towards the platform’s capabilities.
- Salesforce Health Cloud:
- Salesforce Health Cloud offers native features and guided processes that can be easily enabled with minimal configuration.
- To ensure a successful implementation, it’s essential to start planning the assimilation process from the beginning of the program.
- By introducing power users to the native Health Cloud experience as it is, and getting them familiar with the platform’s capabilities, we can significantly benefit the program.
- This familiarity with the native platform experience will play a crucial role in ensuring sustainability amid upcoming regulations, process changes, and other challenges.
Conclusion
In the fast-paced world of healthcare, sustainability has become a critical necessity for success. Although digital transformation initiatives recognize its importance initially, it often takes a back seat during implementation. To ensure sustainability remains at the forefront, it must be incorporated into every minimum lovable/viable product release.. By embracing sustainability from the start, healthcare providers can thrive in a competitive industry, fostering innovation, improving patient care, and building a resilient future in healthcare.
At Mav3rik, we bring a proactive approach, meeting sustainability demands through a comprehensive assessment of extensive customizability, ready-to-use features, and tailored functionalities. Our expertise extends from clinical insights to accelerators, all built upon the foundation of solutions developed atop the platform, utilising its data model, frameworks, and more.