Why Appropriate Investment in Digital Health Will Vastly Improve Our Health System
4 Jul 2023
Smart new hospital technology is becoming increasingly affordable, bringing to hospitals the ability to strengthen and scale health systems to save more lives. Yet uptake is slow - caused in part by decision-makers who still hold a view focused almost solely on short-term financial measures. This view fails to consider the large downstream value created from connecting clinicians and patients to a digital health ecosystem, and the positive long-term impact on individual hospitals, department staff and patients.
Smart new hospital technology is becoming increasingly affordable, bringing to hospitals the ability to strengthen and scale health systems to save more lives. Yet uptake is slow - caused in part by decision-makers who still hold a view focused almost solely on short-term financial measures. This view fails to consider the large downstream value created from connecting clinicians and patients to a digital health ecosystem, and the positive long-term impact on individual hospitals, department staff and patients.
With growing waiting lists, a decision not to invest in smart new generation technology actually increases risk through delaying the roll out of solutions necessary to solve many of the challenges currently plaguing health care. Continuing to support struggling systems denies clinicians a raft of new helpful aids, and slows the improvement of our increasingly unsustainable health care system..
As the full value of digital health becomes understood and appreciated, an increasing number of hospitals in Australasia are beginning to reallocate funding to digital health. But in other hospitals, decision makers are still hesitant to redirect healthcare dollars, even though its apparent that investing in digital health will soon be unavoidable.
Focusing only on traditional short-term financial outcomes is unlikely to deliver a complete view of the value and opportunities.
One helpful view is the three‐horizon model described in 2023 in a Medical Journal Australia article ‘Show me the money: how do we justify spending health care dollars on digital health?’ The authors propose using three horizons each delivering increasing amounts of value.
Horizon 1 focuses on enabling clinicians who use digital workflows to streamline the collection and retrieval of clinical data.
Horizon 2 creates useful aggregated data and analytics for quality improvement.
Horizon 3 implements new digitally enabled models of care.
Traditional evaluation of hospital technology tends to focus on a point earlier than Horizon 1 and neglects the value of the two-way flow of aggregated data, analytics that bring new models of care with its increased quality and safety.
‘Show me the money: how do we justify spending health care dollars on digital health?’ by Leanna Woods, Rebekah Eden, Oliver J Canfell, Kim‐Huong Nguyen, Tracy Comans and Clair Sullivan:
Looking forward with a clearer understanding of the potential, brings an immediate shift in appreciation - from that of perceiving digital health as an additional cost to that of new level of enablement that is capable of step-changes within hospital departments and permanently transforming health care.
By broadening scope and expectations the disabling fear of implementing new generation technology disappears.
Digital health delivers new benefits not previously possible, leading to an opportunity to transform the way hospital departments operate. They include:
enhanced opportunities for new levels of monitoring, risk management, and quality improvement.
automation of accurate compliance reporting
real-time auditing and feedback
reduced unwarranted variation in care and preventable harm
clinicians’ time liberated – perhaps as much as 30%
improved patient centredness
opportunity for multicentre research using one set of data fields
The value of these significant improvements cannot be ignored - yet they are rarely factored into financial evaluations.
Smart new generation software is beginning to deliver new interventions that are meaningful to staff, clinicians and patients across all three horizons. This takes digital health beyond simplistic profit and loss evaluations. Australasian hospitals are beginning to re-allocate funding and finding that even a modest investment is providing new opportunities to improve their hospitals ability to deliver care at scale.
A new practical appreciation of downstream benefits is critical to understanding digital transformation and how it delivers increased quality, patient safety and transforms hospital departments.
Start with your gynaecology department.
Increasingly used by Australasian and NZ hospitals, Gynaecology Plus has the capability to plug in to any hospital system and begin to deliver time-saving benefits in a matter of days.
Because Gynaecology Plus has been built with the input of leading gynaecologists its interface is very intuitive so very little training is required. Benefits are delivered intelligently, seamlessly, and immediately and it’s designed to be affordable within nearly every hospital department budget.
Begin with the basics and then transform each area of your gynaecology department over time.
Please arrange for an obligation-free demonstration. We can support your business case with quantified hospital cost and time savings. Watch a short video on the benefits and advantages being enjoyed by Gynecology Plus users.
Gynaecology Plus is the first clinical specialist Gynaecology software to integrate with the Australian National Cancer Screening Register
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