IT Transformation Management in Healthcare

Making IT Adoption Smooth & As Least Disruptive As Possible

The healthcare industry has been known in the past to face certain infrastructure technology advancement in a rather skeptical fashion - and with good reasons:

• Challenging business model: The fee-for-service payment model that physicians and many healthcare facilities have to operate under discourages any technological advancements that could reduce the amount of patient visits or cause unnecessary disruption to the workforce.
• High Tech vs. High Touch: Hospitals and physicians have to walk a very delicate line to protect the patient's privacy and sense of getting personal care. The need for a high touch migration for many staff drives cost and complexity into the projects whilst necessitating a much higher level of testing and readiness for those critical patient supporting applications.
• Tangible benefits: Many healthcare providers, insurance companies, and other health-related organizations would love the benefits of the technologies, but with patient care at the forefront of any decision making, the funding for an infrastructure transformation against a patient technology benefit is always a hard sell.

IT migrations or entire IT transformation projects are more challenging in the healthcare industry because:

• Highly specialized, mobile workforce: Many larger hospitals, nursing homes and rehab facilities have tens of thousands of highly-skilled, specialized employees that use clinical machines or require mobile access to IT (e.g., through tablets) to consider as opposed to the majority of people sitting at a desk and using a few applications.
• More locations: Large healthcare providers, such as larger clinics or hospitals, often are also more distributed regarding location. This can prove difficult to manage without an efficient way to track devices, users, and their associated locations. 
• Large number of custom built apps: As patients increasingly demand more access to health records, appointment schedules, etc. and want to have more involvement in the process while in care, healthcare providers often custom-develop a disproportionate amount of custom apps, which are difficult to migrate, for example on a new OS.
• Risk of disruption: It is critical, that a healthcare provider has efficient processes and effective standard operating procedures in place to run smoothly. While some updates are necessary, IT departments in larger healthcare organizations often hold back as long as possible in fear of disrupting the daily routine. 

How Can Dashworks Help?

IT Transformation projects are avoidable - but only for a period of time! Having machines run on software or operating systems that have reached their end-of-life and are not supported anymore, puts your organization at serious risks — for example, security breaches, system failures, data loss and software audits to just mention a few. In addition, many doctors and nurses out in the field are not so technically inclined or have the time and energy to learn a new technology for themselves. So if something breaks or does not perform as it should because of a bumpy migration, would put an enormous burden on the technical support staff and lead to disruption in service delivery.

Dashworks is an IT Transformation Management Tool that allows IT project managers to automate gain an exact overview of the IT landscape by providing a single version of the project truth, allow users to give valuable context with self-service, and — most importantly for healthcare providers — create tailored migration routes for different types of workers. It also make the discovery, rationalization, and packaging of the large amount of internally-built, custom applications easier that can be otherwise very problematic to migrate, especially if they are out of support. 

To learn more about how our solution can help you transform your IT or help you continuously manage your IT assets, please schedule a personalized demo or download our buyer's guide.