Preface
The topic of transforming healthcare is not new. As early as 2014, a report to the US President was issued with the following six recommendations:
- Accelerate alignment of payment systems with desired outcomes
- Increase access to relevant health data and analytics
- Provide technical assistance in systems engineering approaches
- Involve communities in improving healthcare delivery
- Share lessons learned from successful improvement efforts
- Train healthcare professionals in new skills and approaches
(Refer to BETTER HEALTH CARE AND LOWER COSTS: ACCELERATING IMPROVEMENT THROUGH SYSTEMS ENGINEERING.)
Although COVID-19 has put things in motion, it is still, as the World Health Organization puts it in various publications (refer to who.int), the technology to improve the health of populations that remains largely untapped, and there is immense scope for the use of digital health solutions.
Technology is an important driver for change, but in essence, we should design and plan for personalized health and not focus on just the technology. Healthcare transformation requires more than just technology: medical staff, supporting staff, and patients including their community such as next of kin, need to embrace it. We need a methodology to bring it all together – people, organizations, and technology – by creating a common understanding.
This book presents ways to build an understanding between stakeholders and agree jointly on the way forward. The intention of this book is to make developers aware of the models to understand the complexity of healthcare so they can recognize this complexity when involved in large healthcare transformation projects. We only briefly explain what each model is about. In the Further reading section at the end of each chapter, we refer to in-depth sources.
Every chapter of this book has a specific theme, providing a comprehensive overview of the challenges, the opportunities, and the approaches to deal with them in architecture and transformation. By the end of this book, you will be able to guide the digital transformation of global healthcare. The book discusses the impact of new technologies but addresses primarily a methodology or framework for common understanding in the first place. The framework is referred to as Transformation in Sustainable Healthcare (TiSH). In addition, you will also apply Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) principles and DevOps4Care to real-world examples, step by step.
By the end of this book, you will not only understand the issues and challenges of transformation of healthcare but also possess a workable, actionable solution in the form of a roadmap.
Who this book is for
This book is written for all interested in designing, building, and providing data-driven healthcare, specifically architects, consultants, engineers, and especially healthcare practitioners who want to embrace the complexity of the digital transformation of healthcare. The book will also be interesting for digital leaders, including C-level executives. Last but not least, this book is for anyone who is on a learning path to understand the world of technological innovation combined with healthcare and wants to be a part of it.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding (the Need for) Transformation, provides a broad introduction to the book, exploring the various challenges that healthcare faces, such as an aging population and scarcity of skilled staff.
Chapter 2, Exploring Relevant Technologies for Healthcare, explores the combined possibilities of new technologies, but always from the health experience perspective.
Chapter 3, Unfolding the Complexity of Transformation, is where we learn about the policies and regulations that form guardrails in healthcare and how this affects the transformation.
Chapter 4, Including the Human Factor in Transformation, is where we learn how to prevent humans – patients and care workers – from getting lost in regulations, systems, technology, and data. We must find a balance between man and machine.
Chapter 5, Leveraging TiSH as Toolkit for Common Understanding, provides an introduction to TiSH and DevOps4Care, including the underlying models and methods.
Chapter 6, Applying the Panarchy Principle, is about community building using ecocycles to overcome inhibitions and start planning the actual transformation.
Chapter 7, Creating New Platforms with OODA, introduces and teaches you how to work with the OODA loop as a way to drive the transformation using feedback loops.
Chapter 8, Learning How Interaction Works in Technology-Enabled Care Teams, introduces the Journey Interaction Matrix (JIM), where we can follow the teams and monitor the activities throughout the health journey and interact with other teams in the ecosystem.
Chapter 9, Working with Complex (System of) Systems, is where we learn how to create a common understanding of how to integrate and transform into personal directed healthcare with the relevant solutions and systems, tread by tread in TiSH.
Chapter 10, Assessments with TiSH, is where we learn to perform assessments in healthcare, all in preparation for the transformation. For this, maturity models are introduced.
Chapter 11, Planning, Designing, and Architecting the Transformation, is where we put it all together, the concepts of TiSH and JIM, working with OODA loops, and forming the teams, and really start executing the transformation.
Chapter 12, Executing the Transformation, includes real-world examples of companies that have gone through a transformation. It ends with a big invitation to join the digital transformation of healthcare and help shape the future.
To get the most out of this book
Depending on your background prior to reading this book, we recommend you familiarize yourself with some concepts on which this book builds, such as the following:
- Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline on systems thinking and the iceberg model
- Architectural reasoning from one of the reviewers of this book, Gerrit Muller
- Enterprise DevOps for Architects, by one of the authors of this book, Jeroen Mulder, published by Packt Publishing
- WHO’s view on digital health: https://www.who.int/health-topics/digital-health#tab=tab_1
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/2JSK8.
Conventions used
Tips or important notes
Appear like this.
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