Successful businesses are tuned into change from external environments and can quickly refine or reinvent business models and practices to drive the organization forward. Adaptability can be leveraged as a competitive business advantage, especially regarding technology. Technology is a rapidly changing industry that offers better, faster, and more effective solutions every year.
Healthcare providers can maximize technology to improve organizational outcomes. At Medicus IT, we look at how healthcare organizations can shift perspective and maximize technology to provide better patient care in a new webinar. Learn more about our March webinar, Shift Your Perspective: Maximize Technology to Evolve Your Practice:
Shift Your Perspective
Consumers are looking for acceleration, ease, and speed when it comes to services, whether retail or healthcare. Patients expect to make an appointment online, have access to their health information, and experience a streamlined process like consumers in retail today. Healthcare consumers want easy access to providers and health information to be active participants in their health outcomes.
Having technology at your disposal does not directly correlate to success; it’s how you use the technology and engage with the systems that make your organization thrive. Shifting the perspective from just "having" the technology to leveraging your technology to make a difference can improve organizational outcomes.
Read & Act on Industry Drivers
Hundreds of drivers impact businesses on a daily basis. They can be divided into five main categories:
Market: The market brings expectations to the company. Today's online shopping - one-click ordering, free shipping, and same-day delivery is responsible for many recent market changes, like employees wanting to work remotely. The patient experience demands are also changing, and patients want access to real-time health information. Drivers in the market should be signs that a company needs to adapt and listen to the market demands or get left behind.
Competition: The competitive landscape is changing, so private equity firms buy small practices and create mega-companies. These large companies are able to invest in technology at a much faster rate, making it difficult for the smaller players to compete.
Crisis: A prominent example in the last two years is COVID, which forced businesses to drastically change and adapt. However, a crisis can also be a natural disaster, acts of terrorism, war, or political and economic unrest. Crisis drivers cause IT challenges that force us to evolve and figure out how to continue providing quality care.
Threats: Drivers in the threat category typically revolve around security. The advancement of technology and moving patient information online opens businesses up to the potential for compromised data and is a greater concern now than ever before.
Regulatory: These drivers affect the way healthcare providers do business. In particular, the healthcare industry has significant federal and state oversight that leads to regularly changing guidelines, regulations, and surveys. Events like COVID make it so that regulations must be updated continually to protect patients and employees.
Get & Stay Aligned
Technology is a rapidly growing and evolving industry that changes increasingly faster each year. Some drivers create opportunities for change, and organizations can choose to embrace the change as an advantage or wait for it to affect the organization in a potentially harmful way. To stay competitive in an active marketplace, organizations need to keep up with the pace of change.
Many organizations struggle to stay aligned with their technology because they are unaware of the gap between the industry and their organization. When technology is working for an organization, it can be easy to overlook how quickly the industry is advancing. Technology alone is not enough—transformation also comes from people and processes. As technology is integrated into an organization, the people and procedures also need to evolve. It is critical to communicate and prepare patients and employees for new technology so that changes can be successful for all stakeholders.
Focus on Growth & Transformational Efforts
The companies that keep pace with drivers and industry change have about 65% of their investments—time, energy, and money—going into running the organization, 20% of investments on growth, and 15% on transformation. Research found that companies that focus on growth and transformation are more successful than a typical company that spent 80-90% of its resources on running the business, 10-20% on growing, and no resources on transformation. Companies that do not invest in transformation are usually forced into change instead of being an industry leaders and paving the way for new and better solutions.
How Medicus IT Can Help Create the Transformation You Need for Success
Transforming an organization means meeting drivers head-on by leveraging technology, people, and processes. Are you meeting industry drivers head-on? We offer professional services at Medicus IT, including technology assessment, strategy, alignment, advising, and consulting, and can serve as a virtual chief information officer. Before organizations can provide quality care or grow, there needs to be a sustainable technology strategy that identifies gaps and how to stay aligned with industry changes.
Contact us to learn more about how our team can help guide your organization into intentional transformation.
