Written by Dr. Jason S. Lee, The Open Group Healthcare Forum Director
In his 2016 international bestseller, German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab described the coming of a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) as “blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”. Six years on and that statement holds true. It’s a revolution that is disrupting and transforming almost every industry in every country, uncovering both opportunities and challenges that businesses simply cannot ignore.
In healthcare in particular, 4IR technologies hold immense promise with several transformational use cases that could revolutionize the sector and create an impact that will be felt for many years to come.
For example, robotics in surgery can reduce wound site infections, decrease the need for open site surgery, and lessen the length of hospital stays. Telemedicine, health apps, and artificial intelligence (AI) can help increase access to care, reduce costs, improve quality, and support disease prevention and management. , And rapid advances in clinical data analytics can lead to faster and better clinical decision-making.
Lagging behind
The irony is that even as 4IR technologies evolve to ensure better health and healthcare, often at lower cost and higher value, the industry as a whole continues to struggle with the adoption of proven and less complex technologies that have been mature and stable for many years.
As a result, time and time again, healthcare is empirically ranked as one of the worst industries for digital maturity, keeping company with such industries as agriculture, construction and manufacturing. The impact this has, both on standards and delivery, is huge.
There are several reasons behind this. Firstly, the healthcare industry is data-rich, but the challenges of poor interoperability plague our healthcare systems on a worldwide scale. This means that barriers plaguing data exchange, information sharing and security deficiencies are the same across the board, and exist at every level between and within systems and organizations.
One of the biggest reasons for this is the diversity of organizations in the healthcare system, which poses considerable economic challenges for IT vendors and their customers. Secondly, fragmentation across the various different systems — including payers, providers, organizations and offices — often means they do not or cannot share information with one another.
That’s before you take into account the complexity of health and medical data. Medical conditions are often highly intricate and nuanced and even with great effort can be difficult to express in a standardized manner. As a result, automation can be cumbersome or near impossible compared to more traditional methods of data capture.
The business of healthcare is complex too. The evidence base and innovation rate in medicine is highly volatile, and this can sadly lead to variability in the application of standards.
The organizational and incentive structures of healthcare provider organizations can result in barriers to IT adoption for at least three key reasons: a reluctance to share data between one another due to a perceived threat on revenue streams and maintaining a competitive advantage; the dual power structures — administrative and clinical — working against one another and hindering the IT decision making; and increased hospital mergers and acquisition activity increasing system complexity.
Moreover, efforts to keep operational costs flat (or reduced) have exacerbated IT departments’ ability to standardize processes and technologies, which has led to a lackluster effort in adapting to the ever-evolving digital landscape.
All of this naturally leads to the question, how can the healthcare industry adapt faster and securely embrace technological change in order to compete better in a world in which digital transformation is key to success, if not survival?
How Enterprise Architecture can help
Enterprise Architecture could well hold the answers for this problem. In 2016 and again in 2021 the international consulting firm McKinsey, in collaboration with Henley Business School, published results from their research on Enterprise Architecture and the rapidly changing importance of technology in driving business value.
They concluded that the Enterprise Architecture function “is a core element of the foundation that both enables and accelerates the tech transformation that companies need in order to compete in a digital-first world.”
What is it then about Enterprise Architecture that can help the healthcare industry achieve the digital maturity it so desperately needs?
The objective and purpose of Enterprise Architecture is made up of three parts. First, it looks to help businesses succeed by identifying and prioritizing strategies. Second, to get there, it helps to devise and align goals to achieve those strategies. Finally, it creates innovative and agile solutions for even the most challenging technology problems.
These problems are not limited to hospitals, of course. They are commonly encountered across various businesses, industries, and all manner of public and private enterprises. To tackle them, Enterprise Architecture requires high-level and rigorous thought processes, as well as painstaking attention to detail. To achieve the very best outcome, Enterprise Architecture requires coordinated, deliberative action among the diverse stakeholders that it is designed for.
The value proposition of Enterprise Architects lies in their ability to help an organization exploit disruptive forces – such as automation and digitization – to drive change through optimal performance of core business functions. By focusing on how key parts of an organization are interrelated, Enterprise Architecture helps others understand the organization, communicate this understanding to stakeholders, and move the organization forward to where it needs to be.
Common knowledge and accepted business practices promote the view that Enterprise Architecture can help industries to embrace and achieve their digital transformation goals. Indeed, organizations with the most mature Enterprise Architecture programs also have the greatest agility required to adapt to digital transformation when the time is right for the business.
The ability of Enterprise Architecture to contribute to the digital advancement of the healthcare industry is clear. By helping decision makers gain a firmer foothold on how their businesses function, how the different parts of their companies are organized and structured, and how those parts are interrelated in the production of services, Enterprise Architecture makes it easier to document and define the current landscape to effectively change systems, embrace the technology of the Fourth Revolution, and plan for future.