Becker's Hospital Review

51 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING 2 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING SPONSORED BY Healthcare operations leaders hold the key to an integrated enterprise By Tony DiGiorgio, Chief Architect, symplr I n healthcare, frameworks such as the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's groundbreaking Triple Aim and the Quadruple Aim provide guiding points to optimize health system performance. The goals are common to all health systems and include better outcomes, lower costs, improved patient experience, improved clinician experience, workforce well-being and safety, and the advancement of health equity. But achieving these aims requires steady and strong healthcare operations governance by healthcare leaders. And that requires integrated, enterprise technology. There's much work to be done to achieve the truly connected healthcare enterprise: Ponemon Institute surveyed 554 IT and IT security professionals in healthcare companies and found that each organization had an average of 1,320 vendors under contract. Most of those vendors offer siloed point solutions that don't connect with one another or other applications. In a hospital or a health system, three core systems are used every day. One is the EHR, which provides the clinical backbone. The second is the revenue cycle solution, which manages finances, and the third is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, which manages day-to-day business operations. If you imagine each of those as the lines of a triangle, the area in the center is the hospital operations space, where these components come together to facilitate day-to-day business. Healthcare operations leaders and their teams touch all of healthcare's priorities: Elevate patient care delivery, contain costs, maintain compliance, increase revenue, support a burned- out workforce and foster healthier communities. An organization's culture, leaders, workforce composition, technological capabilities and other factors affect where enterprise connections will and won't bond. But the logical starting point is to identify and make crucial connections using enterprise healthcare operations software technology. Doing so will make every healthcare operations job easier. Objectives and outcomes of healthcare operations These day-in-the-life scenarios of healthcare operations leaders reflect common outcomes goals: • A supply chain administrator requires unbiased, evidence- based data to identify value and potential savings in contracts, products and services purchased. • A CNO must align patient care goals with the workforce's well-being. This requires clinical communication and easy- to-use collaboration tools that help providers. • The leader of the combined quality and medical staff services department strives to use provider data to aid in compliance, safety and quality as it historically has. But now there are also expectations to use the data to mine revenue. • The chief compliance officer must translate for colleagues the impact and risks of failing to comply with federal and state regulations and accreditors, and the organization's own bylaws, policies and procedures. • The CTO/CIO bears the weight of defining and delivering the technical strategy of the entire organization. This is a difficult task made harder by cybersecurity threats and other physician and virtual access challenges. Addressing these objectives will require digital transformation that relies on transparency, connectivity and security. Similar to the many benefits that new, streamlined technologies have brought to other industries, digital transformation has the potential to significantly improve healthcare by modernizing and streamlining areas such as clinical communications, the EHR, workforce management, provider data management, access and vendor management, spend and contracting, and more. We can improve all of this with the ability to interoperate between all of them in a connected fashion that supports the deficiencies of one with value from another. For example, technological inefficiency is a leading and well- known cause of burnout among healthcare workers and staff. An astounding 60 percent of physicians say they're burned out by administrative tasks. And nursing shortages and the pandemic have exacerbated staffing issues across the industry. Thirty-two percent of registered nurses surveyed in November 2021 said they may leave their current direct-patient-care role, according to McKinsey & Company. However, the right technology can provide hospitals with more efficient and seamless workflows for behind-the-scenes activity and take much of the administrative burden off of healthcare workers. Areas ripe for transformation and more disciplined data management include the elimination of duplicate data entry, inefficient workflows, multiple logins, and cumbersome, slow

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