As we work with healthcare organizations, both those focused on delivering patient services and those providing healthcare insurance, there is one common thread. All of these organizations are dealing with an overwhelming amount of healthcare change.
Healthcare change can mean new processes, new organization structures or new technology like electronic medical records. But no matter what the nature of the healthcare change, the need for effective change management is readily apparent. At the end of the day, these healthcare changes will not be sustainable unless the organization is able to achieve adoption.
Many of our clients have had past struggles with failed or sub-optimized projects, and they are starting to recognize that the investment they are making in healthcare change also requires a parallel investment in healthcare change management. Through a systematic and systemic approach to healthcare change management like the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) these organizations are able to increase speed, improve patient quality of care and patient satisfaction, and increase competitive advantage.
Where to start with healthcare change?
If you are undergoing a significant amount of change in a healthcare organization, where should you start? One of the first steps we recommend to clients who are experiencing dramatic healthcare change is to conduct an Implementation History Assessment.
This Assessment provides the “patient history” of the organization’s past implementation history and identifies potential healthcare change management barriers such as Sponsorship, Readiness for Change, Reinforcement issues, and Communication obstacles. Using the results of this Assessment, we are able to take an objective, data-based approach to healthcare change management, and dramatically increase the likelihood of adoption and successful healthcare change.
Contact us to hear more about how we can improve your Healthcare Change projects.
According to a recent New York Times article, the Obama Administration expects to spend about 19 billion dollars to accelerate the use of computerized records by Health Care systems and doctors offices. In the same article, Dr. Blackford Middleton, Chairman for the Center for Technology Leadership states, “What is underappreciated is the implementation challenge.”
These electronic medical records are the basis for both the diagnostic and economic lifeblood of any medical care practice, so getting the implementation right the first time is essential. Notes Dr. Patricia Korber, MD, "In my own practice, we thought we were ready, but we underestimated the degree of difficulty we were going to face.”
Unfortunately getting the technology “installed”, meaning that it is up and running, is not synonymous with gaining sustained adoption, or “implementation.” The difference between installation and implementation is not mere semantics; it is a quantitative and qualitative difference that reflects the speed and return for the human and financial resources that will be invested in electronic medical records or EMR. EMR implementation speed is critical to health care providers both financially and because of the disruption to work flow and efficiency that directly impacts the quality of patient care.
Interestingly, the Obama Administration has set forth, but not yet defined, its term of “meaningful use” of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) as a criterion for subsidized payment for implementation in Doctors’ offices.
Based upon our thirty years of field research at IMA, over 70% of technology system implementations in Healthcare Systems (such as EMR implementations) fail to achieve on time and on budget what they promised to their organizations. In over 85% of the cases we have observed, technological integrity is not the issue. Ultimately, the technology will do what it is supposed to do. The stumbling block is in how to integrate the human beings with the technology as quickly as possible.
This literally becomes like those old Fram oil filter commercials: “You can pay me now or pay me later.” Any medical practice or health care system can either spend time to create readiness, or Prepay a substantial price for resistance to change and sub-optimized systems. After implementing technical systems in health care environments for two decades, we have yet to discover a situation where the third “no payment required” option came into play.