The Power of Partnership in Healthcare IT
Successful technology adoption in healthcare depends on strong partnerships between IT and clinical teams. Eric Yablonka highlights the importance of aligning with operational leaders, like clinical and financial executives, to ensure that new technology meets real needs. This collaborative approach helps overcome challenges like change management, especially when solutions integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. Flexible technologies, such as cloud-based systems, are key to making these transitions smoother and faster, enabling organizations to adapt quickly to new demands.
Listen to Narinder Singh and Eric Yablonka discuss the importance of building strong partnerships between IT and clinical teams, emphasizing how alignment, seamless data integration, and flexible technology solutions can drive successful adoption and improve patient care.
Video Transcript
Narinder Singh:
You’ve worked with clinical teams your whole career, your not our doctor and nurse yourself. What makes for great collaboration between technical teams and clinical teams? And similarly, what makes for great collaborations between outside innovators, companies like look Deep and the hospitals and the teams that are trying to shepherd responsible technology adoption inside of them?
Eric Yablonka:
That’s a great question. I think really in the healthcare organizations, lemme think about this for a second, I’m sorry. So from an alignment perspective, the most successful programs I’ve been involved with are very strong partnerships with the operating staffs of the organization, whether they be clinical, financial or supply chain. And that alignment is made possible go through relationships and through structures project and program structures where people take leadership roles in those initiatives. So to me, we would always have a sponsor who would be outside of it who is really owning the clinical or the business process, usually an executive with a team under them aligned with it and our capabilities and we walked the CIO and the sponsor walked arm in arm in the projects to ensure that we could execute. We were very good at things like project and program management, technology assessment and implementation, but the change management really happened if it was a nursing application on the floor with the nurses or if it was in radiology.
It really happened with the radiologists and the technicians. And so our philosophy was we don’t do it to you, we do it with you and we make sure that we have that alignment because at the end of the day, again, change management is always one of the biggest issues and CIOs generally don’t tell clinicians how to practice or give them advice. What the best way to practice is. They know that we might have opinions on the technology and what it can do for them as it relates to their needs or we might want to partner up and do something really interesting. And in advanced places that I’ve worked advanced academic medical centers, there were a lot of technologists out of it outside of it as well, and partnering with ‘EM was critical. So without a sponsor, without strong partnership, both organizationally as well as culturally, you actually can’t get things done or it goes really, really bad.
When I look at relieving pressure on your nursing and care teams in days or weeks, that would’ve been a dream come true. But in those days or weeks, the biggest challenge might be to change management and getting people up and running and less the technology. So I think my experience, the thrills of victory, the amazing projects always had strong partnerships and sometimes the agony of defeat was really the challenge around either change management or sometimes even getting the technology to work. We’ve had to remove systems that just didn’t work and those kinds of bad outcomes do happen and that’s usually not because of an alignment issue. That’s usually a technology issue and that’s something that everybody worked really hard to avoid.
Narinder Singh:
I want to follow up with one thing you said there in terms of the days or weeks, I think there’s two situations where that’s feasible. One is the emergency situation or something like that where there’s just no choice. You’ll take the worst solution as long as you can get it now versus spending six months to get to the best one. The second I think is interestingly matched to the flexibility of cloud where if it can in Bruce Lee’s words flow like water around the clinical workflow, then you have a chance of days and weeks. If you have to change the clinical workflow, you’ll never get to days or weeks because of what you just highlighted around change management. So to me, and to us we believe this kind of flow like water around the clinical workflow so it doesn’t feel like I’m forcing you to take some different action, but it feels very much in the flow of what you’re doing. That’s how you get to these kinds of metrics. Related to that, you talked a lot about the internal partnership. What about the external? What advice do you have for companies like look Deep or others on the partnership with outside innovators trying to bring new thinking, new capabilities and how that partnership can be most aligned and moved as efficiently as possible