Beyond Reporting to Collaborative Management Facilitation

Have healthcare IT tools successfully improved the ability of organizations to provide exceptional patient care?

Our application designers, with expertise in technology, learning psychology and perceptive science,  have listened intently to hundreds of healthcare leaders describe their experiences with numerous healthcare IT products. This research led us to identify several common weaknesses in the design of many such products and understand them in the perspective of the evolution of systems design over the past several decades.

Several challenges contribute to the commonly lamented fundamental issue of “too many moving parts”. Some key components that contribute to negative productivity are:

• Applications that are little more than databases, with forms for entry and reports, which only select and re-arrange the data, exactly as it was entered, without any real processing, transformation or added value.
• Applications that inappropriately mimic the steps in processes devised in a non-digital “paper” environment and artifacts (forms, diagrams, voluminous reports, and documents) that perpetuate the paper process’ characteristics. Such deliberate stagnation drains resources and impedes innovation.
• Applications that, in total, produce a deliverable that is only an intermediate step toward a real goal – of questionable necessity in terms of the goal – creating a call for attention and a false sense of accomplishment.
• Applications that fail to do the very things for which technology should be applied—to drastically reduce repetition, manage the vastness of raw data/information, leverage human decisions, help focus attention on important things, appropriately divide responsibilities between machine and human, and enable an increase in productivity.

These inefficiencies hinder an organization’s ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its mission and purpose, and work effectively and efficiently. One of the most impactful ways to address these issues is to enable active and appropriately-informed C-suite participation.

By focusing on and uniting the three essential questions of executive oversight—where are we, how did we get here, and what is being done to improve—such a platform can be the hub of management communication. All the meaningful information for both frontline staff and management is seen and acted upon in unison and is easy to access and understand so analysts and assistants do not have to intermediate. This delivers the spirit of Hoshin Kanri, in a facilitated workflow that ensures the strategic goals of a company are communicated through the organization to drive progress and action at every level within the organization, without dependence on complicated and time-consuming diagrams and other artifacts.

Instead of just delivering dead data in the form of reports, the ActionCue application facilitates action in the management of the improvement process by enhancing communication, focus, learning and accountability.  Prista’s ActionCue Clinical Intelligence platform was specifically designed to enable a “Fast Path to Insight” – which creates intuitive communication tools throughout the organization and allows real-time collaboration to drive performance improvement. It goes beyond mere quality-safety reporting and empowers users at all levels of the organization to engage with an IT tool that optimizes both data collection and analysis.

This post is part 2 of our 7 Innovation series. Interested in reading more? Download the 7 Innovations that Deliver Strategic Value in Healthcare White Paper