How should a health system choose its 1st departments for a new Digital Health innovation?

Imagine you are a hospital or health system looking to implement a new Digital Health solution.

Maybe you’re looking at Digital Care Journeys to engage and remotely monitor patients pre and post-surgery, thereby reducing staff burden for patient education, phone calls and early discharge. Or perhaps you’re excited about Ambient Voice Technology to automate clinical documentation and reduce pajama time for frontline staff.

Even though you have an enterprise-wide rollout in mind long-term, you have to start somewhere and demonstrate success. You want strong internal references for all the change management you’re planning to embark on. Everyone will watch whether those initial champion departments were successful or not.

So what departments do you start with: Women’s Health? Orthopedics? Cardiovascular? Oncology?Primary care?

Make your decision thoughtfully.

Because no matter the situation,?WHO?champions your innovation first has a huge impact on the long-term success of this initiative.

I’ve seen health system innovations tank simply because they chose the wrong place to start.

So how do you decide where to start?

I advise health system leaders to choose champion departments based on 2 key factors:

1. Impact and ROI: Who has the biggest need?

Not all departments or units will get the same benefit from a new innovation.

However, to demonstrate the potential upside as quickly as possible, you should strategically identify departments that have:

• (a) the biggest pain points that matter today
• (b) the highest volume of activity

For example, at SeamlessMD, Orthopedics is often the best department to first use our digital care journey platform because:

• Total joint replacement is among the highest volume procedures
• There are various burning platforms, such as drivers to increase surgical throughput by safely shifting to more same-day surgeries, value-based care incentives (e.g. bundled payments), etc.

In contrast, the wrong first use cases for us may be:

• A rare pediatric condition because it’s usually much lower volume, and therefore would take a lot longer time to collect data and show benefit
• Gallbladder surgery because there are minimal pain points you could make a dent on – e.g. LOS, readmissions, ED visits etc. are relatively low

2. Champion availability: Who are your self-motivated, early adopters?

Technology is not a magic pill – it’s simply a tool that has potential for impact when used effectively.

Even the best Digital Health interventions need strong people support to navigate change management and motivate the team to adopt the technology while data is being collected to prove the ROI.

Reflect on your organization’s history and ask:

• Who has a track record of being believers and evangelists of new innovations?
• Who has successfully led initiatives to improve quality, patient experience or operations in the past?

We all know those clinical or operational leaders who are not only dissatisfied with the status quo, but are also change makers with a track record of putting in the work to improve how things are done. Bring your innovation to them and see if they (and their department) will get on board.

For example, at SeamlessMD, this might be:

• The Orthopedic surgeon who leads the same-day surgery initiative
• The provider who started Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS)
• The Quality or Patient Experience leader for a department

Should you only start with 1 department?

I’ve worked with health systems who are fully committed to the vision and have rolled our platform out to 10+ departments in 12-18 months.

But what if that’s not you? What if you want to dip your toes first?

In those cases, I still generally advise health systems to go a bit bigger. Start with at least 2 or 3 departments simultaneously at the beginning.

Why?

There are too many unknowns with just one department:

• If it goes well: did you just luck out with the perfect clinical/operational teams involved?
• If it goes poorly: is it because the vendor and platform are not the right fit? Or were there unique challenges in that department that would not be an issue with other departments?

With only one department in play, you won’t ever truly know. So the best way to fully answer those questions is to have multiple data points available from Day 1.

What do you think? What’s worked for you when bringing a new healthcare innovation into your organization?