Turning Healthcare Sexy: Technology’s Role

At its core, healthcare is unsexy.

Think about what health care staff, clinicians and patients actually ‘do’ everyday….

For health care staff their daily work involves:

Looking for a wheelchair: unsexy

Checking the code cart: unsexy

Stocking the patient room: unsexy

Sterilizing equipment: unsexy

Calling to confirm patient appointments: unsexy

(Staff do a lot of checking and stocking)

For Clinicians their daily work involves:

Running through a pre-surgical check-list: unsexy

Washing hands: unsexy

Clinical documentation: unsexy

Double checking patient identification: unsexy

Order entry: unsexy

Reading patient’s journals: unsexy

Reviewing medication reconciliation forms: unsexy

For patients their unsexy ‘work’ includes:

Waiting in line to see check-in at your doctor’s office: unsexy

Waiting to pick up medications: unsexy

Waiting in the lobby to be called for an X-ray (or blood draw): unsexy

Writing disease symptoms into a journal: unsexy

Waiting in the waiting room(!): unsexy

Waiting for your doctor once you are in the treatment room: unsexy

(Patients do a lot of waiting)

So, what’s the ‘sexy stuff?’

Clinical procedures

Surgery

Taking vital signs (at least I think so)

Patient education (some think this is very unsexy however)

Discussing clinical problems with patients

Performance improvement (although some think this is very unsexy)

Being seen on-time by doctors

Having staff pick up the phone to answer patient questions

The Problem with Unsexy Stuff

Besides unsexy stuff being ‘unfun’ to do, the real problem is that these activities and tasks quickly becomes boring, easily ignored and a point of irritation: Waiting in the waiting room is frustrating. Waiting for prescriptions is frustrating and a big time-waste. Running through a pre-surgical check list is boring. Stocking patient rooms is sometimes skipped. Washing hands in between each patient is time consuming and hard on the skin.

The Importance of Unsexy Stuff

Truth be told, the majority of what health care ‘is’ is a series of routine, repetitive activities punctuated by actual medical management. Yet, these daily, hum-drum activities are the building blocks of a reliable and secure operational enterprise. Absent these routines and the whole system crashes.

The paradox that boring routines are critical to daily operations is not lost on those who study system’s engineering, patient safety and quality. Performing tasks reliably is what makes organizations highly reliable and safe (along with many cultural contributions). Following evidenced-based check lists and guidelines is what ensures that patients don’t receive the wrong surgery. Washing hands is the absolute foundation of reducing infections. Yet all of these tasks happen less than 50% of the time (JAMA).

What all these examples share in common is that they are perceived as a waste of time or an interruption to other, more important (AKA: sexy) activities. Hence, everyone including patients, healthcare staff and clinicians, want to do away with each item on the above list.

Getting Rid of Unsexy Stuff

And perhaps for the first time, the promise of ‘solving’ all these is becoming a reality…through technology.

The promise (and reality) of technology is to remove many of these repetitive, unsexy tasks from people and push them onto technology—which is the perfect fix. Why? Because artificial intelligence takes repetitive processes and builds structured data that has pattern recognition abilities which can ‘mimic’ and replace the human in these processes with technological interfaces. Essentially technology can build a better ‘mouse trap’ which does not include humans. 

Take for example, one company I’m working with that has developed a platform to keep accurate inventory levels in the operating room, complete with automatic re-order of all approved SKUs, thus eliminating the need for manual re-count after every surgery. Another company I’m working with ‘tags’ all mobile assets (including wheel chairs, gurneys, IV poles and similar), providing real-time ‘eyes on’ these items so that staff can easily locate necessary equipment with little wasted time. Another company passively tracks disease symptoms thus doing away with patient journals and the inaccuracies that go along with ‘remembering’ daily actions and symptoms.

The New Unsexy

But technology is not a panacea. It too will create inefficiencies and waste. For example, I do not know a single doctor or nurse that wants to get more alerts about patient’s symptoms, yet so many apps are set up to ‘ping’ the care team when a patient’s critical value (like blood pressure or blood glucose) drops or rises above a certain level… As I’ve said before, data serves a higher master. And in this example, the higher master is to provide more context to the patient health narrative—not provide more pings.

Nor can technology-enabled structured data extract years of experience, or reason, or empathy, which is still very core and vital to the medical care aspect of healthcare.

Creating the New Sexy

Technology is fundamentally disrupting the cottage industry of yesteryear medicine. And through human-informed technology, the way patients and providers ‘engage’ with healthcare is being completely ‘rearranged’ and disrupted.

The healthcare industry is the perfect image of a window hinged open: on one side of the window is the traditional mindset of incrementalism, and the other side of the hinge is the accelerating new world of disruption and displacement, with the opportunity to breathe new life into a tired, old industry.

About the author: Julie Kliger is recognized by LinkedIn as a "Top Voice" in Health Care in 2015 & 2106, & 2107. She is a Healthcare ‘Strategic Realist’ who is passionate about improving health care and improving lives. She specializes in future-oriented healthcare redesign, optimizing existing operations, implementing new care models and strategic change management. She is an advisor, management consultant, clinician, health system board member, speaker and author. 

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