Three steps to digital/AI transformation

In his book,?The Four Steps to the Epiphany, ?Steve Blank described what has become the gospel of lean startup methodologies: Customer validation, customer discovery, customer creation and company building

The path to sick care digital transformation is a bit shorter, but certainly no less difficult and plagued by failure: Personal innovation readiness, organizational innovation readiness and digital/AI transformation.

PERSONAL INNOVATION READINESS

?Are you prepared to innovate??Here's what you should know about innovation.

Before you start, prepare yourself with these things:

MINDSET

Starting down the entrepreneurship path means that you will not only have to change your mind about things, more importantly, you will have to change your mindset.?Don't make these rookie mindset mistakes. ?Here's what it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset. ?There is a?difference between a clinical and an entrepreneurial mindset. ?Innovation starts with the right mindset.

Here is how to cope in a VUCA world.

You will need a digital mindset too.

MOTIVATION

Organizational behavior gurus have been studying how to motivate employees for a very long time. ?Most have failed.

Indeed, most of your ideas will fail. Consequently, you will need a source of intrinsic motivation to keep you going.?Make it personal, but don't take it personally. ?Find the?right mentors and sponsors to keep you on track ?and support you when you are down.?Create a personal advisory board. ?Develop these?entrepreneurial habits. ?Practice the power of?negative entrepreneurial thinking.

MEANING

Meaning should drive what you are about to do.?Practice virtuous entrepreneurship and find your ikigai. ?Instead of starting with the end in mind,?start with the why in mind. ?Prune. ?Let?go of the banana.

MEANS

Once these attitudes are in place,?then focus on building your entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, behaviors and competencies. ?Take a financial inventory. Start accumulating the physical, human and emotional resources you will need to begin and sustain your journey. In addition to knowledge, you will need resources, networks, mentors, peer support and non-clinical career guidance.

METRICS

What are some standards and metrics you can us to measure your innovation readiness e.g. in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine?

The?American National Standards Institute ?(ANSI) has released a?new report ?that reflects stakeholder recommendations and opportunities for greater coordination of standardization for artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. The report, "Standardization Empowering AI-Enabled Systems in Healthcare," reflects feedback from a 2020 ANSI leadership survey and national workshop, and pinpoints foundational principles and potential next steps for ANSI to work with standards developing organizations, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, other government agencies, industry, and other affected stakeholders.

The newly developed Medical Artificial Intelligence Readiness Scale for Medical Students (MAIRS-MS) ?was found to be valid and reliable tool for evaluation and monitoring of perceived readiness levels of medical students on AI technologies and applications. Medical schools may follow 'a physician training perspective that is compatible with AI in medicine' to their curricula by using MAIRS-MS. This scale could be benefitted by medical and health science education institutions as a valuable curriculum development tool with its learner needs assessment and participants' end-course perceived readiness opportunities.

As an important step to ensure successful integration of AI and avoid unnecessary investments and costly failures, better consideration should be given to: (1) Needs and added-value assessment; (2) Workplace readiness: stakeholder acceptance and engagement; (3) Technology-organization alignment assessment and (4) Business plan: financing and investments. In summary,?decision-makers and technology promoters should better address the complexity of AI and understand the systemic challenges raised by its implementation in healthcare organizations and systems.

Leaders who set out to reshape their companies to compete in a fast-evolving digital world often come to a daunting realization: To transform their organizations, they must first transform themselves.

In fact, 71 percent of 1,500 executives surveyed in more than 90 countries said that adaptability was the most important leadership quality in these times. Survey respondents also ranked creativity, curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity as highly desirable traits.?

ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION READINESS

How to master the future proof mindset.

Improvement readiness is not the same as innovation readiness.

Gifford Pinchot, who originated the term "intrapreneur", has suggested that you rate your organization in several domains to see whether your innovation future looks bright or bleek:

1. Transmission of vision and strategic intent
2. Tolerance for risk, failure and mistakes
3. Support for intrapreneurs
4. Managers who support innovation
5. Empowered cross functional teams
6. Decision making by the doers
7. Discretionary time to innovate
8. Attention on the new, not the now
9. Self- selection
10. No early hand offs to managers
11. Internal boundary crossing
12. Strong organizational culture of support
13. Focus on customers
14. Choice of internal suppliers
15. Measurement of innovation
16. Transparency and truth
17. Good treatment of people
18. Ethical and professional
19. Swinging for singles, not home runs
20. Robust external open networks

If you ask a sample of people to rate these in your company on a scale of 1-10, don't be surprised if the average equals somewhere between 2-4. Few organizations, you see, are truly innovative or have a truly innovative culture. Most don't even think about?how to bridge the now with the new , let alone measure it.

Do a cultural audit. ?Creating a culture of innovation must include?SALT and PRICES

Strategy?It's time to rethink what your chief strategy officer is doing.

Alignment

Leadership

Teams/people

?

Process

Recognition

Incentives

Champions

Encouragement

Structure

Here is a rubrick that might help get you started

Learn from companies in other industries who transformed.?Here are some tips from Levi Strauss. ?Here is why?becoming a data driven organization is so hard.

?For digital transformation in healthcare to move from isolated pockets of innovation to an integrated enterprise effort, it needs to address people, processes, and other factors as well as data and technology.?Here are seven critical success factors that can make or break digital transformation in healthcare.

DIGTAL/AI TRANSFORMATION

Develop and deploy the 6Ps: Here is what companies need to know before investing in AI.

Problem seeking

Problem solving

People

Platform/infrastructure

Process/Project management

Performance?indicators that meet clinical, operational, and business objectives and achieve the?quintuple aims. Digital/AI transformation is a means toward an end, not an end in itself. Focus on business and clinical outcomes.

Here are some sick care digital transformation tips. ?Should you have a?department of artificial intelligence?

Here is one model of the stages of digital transformation.

This author points out that the implementation of new technologies can only be truly transformative, with far reaching impacts across a range of stakeholders, if it goes hand-in-hand with organizational, service and social innovation .

But for health care AI to rightly earn the trust of patients and physicians, this multitude has to come together. Developers, deployers and end users of AI—often called artificial intelligence—all need to embrace some core ethical responsibilities.

Scaling the dissemination of AI in the healthcare system involves several key strategies:

1. Stakeholder Engagement: Involve healthcare professionals, patients, and policymakers in the development and implementation of AI solutions to ensure they meet real needs and concerns.
2. Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Foster collaboration between AI experts, clinicians, and healthcare administrators to create solutions that are practical and effective in real-world settings.
3. Regulatory Frameworks: Work with regulatory bodies to establish clear guidelines for AI use in healthcare, ensuring safety, efficacy, and compliance.
4. Education and Training: Provide training for healthcare professionals on AI tools and data literacy to enhance their comfort and competence in using these technologies.
5. Pilot Programs: Start with pilot projects to demonstrate the value of AI applications, collecting data on outcomes to build a case for broader adoption.
6. Integration with Existing Systems: Ensure that AI solutions can easily integrate with current healthcare IT systems (like EHRs) to minimize disruption and encourage uptake.
7. Data Sharing and Collaboration: Promote data sharing among institutions to build larger datasets that improve AI training and validation, while also respecting patient privacy.
8. Funding and Investment: Encourage investment from public and private sectors to support research, development, and deployment of AI technologies in healthcare.
9. Public Awareness and Trust: Increase public awareness of AI in healthcare, addressing misconceptions and building trust through transparency about how AI is used.
10. Continuous Evaluation: Establish mechanisms for ongoing evaluation and feedback on AI applications to refine and improve them over time.

The recent NEJM AI article by Wu et?al.2 quantified real-world uptake of medical AI using commercial payer claims data rather than survey data and illustrates this point well; reimbursement, under appropriate guardrails,3 is key to real-world adoption at scale. Their findings confirm anecdotal evidence that some form of financial return, typically under the FFS mechanism, is a key factor in the successful scaling of medical AI.

An open-access,?peer-reviewed essay ?published in the?Journal of Medical Systems?summarizes these crosscutting responsibilities. And though they don’t all require physicians to take the foremost role, each is make-or-break to the patient-physician encounter.

The path to the end of the rainbow is filled with good intentions and lots of?shiny new objects. ?Stay focused, use your moral compass to guide you and follow the yellow brick road.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the?Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack