Today we face the uncertainty of election day and the resulting outcome on the future for Irish Healthcare. It’s time for technology and business circles to offer some new out of the box thinking.
The strong organisational culture in Irish Healthcare and the length of time traditional healthcare technologies have been delivered make changes difficult. The length and intensity of organisation’s members’ shared history in the face of adversity and unknowns means the culture is strong and resilient to change. The strength and clarity of beliefs of many healthcare leaders is low due to a lowly held positions, meaning morale is low, the key elements of Irish Healthcare culture will have to change.
“Unfreezing” is the first phase of cultural change required is to shake people out of a comfort zone and make them realise they can’t go on as before. The slow imparting of clinical knowledge and the maintenance of older infrastructure and systems in many cases with little documentation means the technical knowledge needed to maintain older systems is obtained through curiosity and chance, and is very time consuming.
Any implementation experience tends to be mainly theory, never standardised or documented and is now unpractical. This lack of standardisation impedes growth; delays to projects are caused by a repetitive learning curve of failed attempts and inevitable dead-end due to the time cycle needed to design, build and validate, rebuild and expand apply to each additional service you want to consume and increases across each project type.
Setting the example and better socialisation would be two levellers that would have the greatest effect. The modernisation of Irish Healthcare architecture and technology means the expansion of current job roles to embrace the new technology of the cloud. Corollary staff “up-skill” and motivation means a better and more productive working environment. Current job roles will be expanded to embrace the whole new world of cloud technologies, this could attract new world class investment and spur employment creation. The inward attraction of newly skilled people to newly created skilled positions will elevate and motivate our workplace to provide the best resources for the benefit of Irish Healthcare.
Cloud First strategy prescribes that all future procurements are developed as “Cloud First” solutions or provide absolute justification for non-consideration in this manner. This strategy will provide a procurement framework for new projects and allow the migration of suitable national systems to the cloud, extending the life-cycle of software and applications with the latest technologies. Preference mapping as part of nudging, could be used to clarify the links between architectural choices and the well-being for patients through better clinical solutions and outcomes.
The changing of learning behavior through adoption of a Cloud First strategy through a strict and detailed procurement process which takes into account the needs of the Irish Healtcare’s primary stakeholder groups, technical, operational and clinical staff to ensure that CSPs are chosen which will serve the needs of clinicians and their patients in a manner that improves the cost and quality of information management both locally and nationally and position Ireland to be a global leader in Electronic Health provision, refreezing or internalising the new behavior.
This behavior could also cement the new behavior by selecting key candidates who reflect the desired beliefs and candidates. The power of lateral influence would be effective is establishing effective influencing of peers. Using soft tactics of personal appeal, consultation when making decisions to gain support, and collaboration to remove obstacles and provide the right resources at the right time to help better effectively achieve group objectives.
The degree of culture change should be seen as less drastic, introducing key organisation members to key technology providers in a non-intimidating manner, to address smaller technology issues and industry remedies to gain a level of trust. Design of physical space is important and difficult in an organisations so large, what is key is that there is consistency across design to reflect the organisations beliefs.