Increasing Clinical IT Adoption

Care Provider organization have spent lot of money and time on clinical IT applications, and sadly most of them are so unstable and rarely effectively used. Most of the available applications require huge work flow re-designs – to suit their technology, instead of the technology fitting work flows. It is a pain for most of the hospitals to get applications implemented effectively, as vendors design systems to make everyone happy, not knowing the uniqueness of healthcare. Some of the points that need to be addressed by Clinical IT development managers and practitioners include:

           ·           Historically IT developers are taught to be focused, and make all the efforts to reduce the variables and develop a solution for the end-user. This is against the very nature of healthcare with its 3V’s (variability, variations and variances). This brings in inflexibility to changes and makes it fail. Most Clinical IT systems have been created with a manufacturing industry mind set.

           ·           Applications have to be designed and developed with clinical practitioners (Care providers) in mind and not the suppliers for facilitating their execution success. Physicians will have to be part of the development team right from ideation to implementation.  With physician’s time being very expensive, a right balance has to be achieved, for maximum adoption.

           ·           Current reality is most systems are not very user friendly, compared to paper based systems. This results in practitioners using mixed systems (partly paper and partly electronic), as observed in many places.

           ·           Clinical IT systems have to be as user friendly as their counterparts in other industries – It ranges from entering large volumes of data through too many input text boxes. This is ends up in making the care provider’s job tedious and prone to many errors.

           ·           Training and support is very often weak, which adds to the clinicians limited computer knowledge and their frustration

           ·           Many care providers enter into contracts Clinical IT applications that they do not fully understand. When this happens, they often end up spending too much for systems that do not meet their needs and are not useful.

Clinical IT systems is more perceived by care providers as data capture systems and care providers have not realized the benefits they can reap to put them to effective use.   Given the fact, that most of the hospitals have large number of applications in their fold, a different strategy has to be adopted. Some of my thought processes related to these issues are available at my recently published whitepaper at the link http://www.hcltech.com/white-papers/index.asp?id=1269492473324