Why I think digitalisation efforts fail in health care — Lessons from a former DJ

This is me, a smiling me. I was a part of a union of DJs in college called SCUD. And let me tell you, getting in was harder than any of my STEM educations.
You see you had to know how to beat mash/mix, and do it well. You also had to know how to cover ALL music genres, so going from an RnB track at 86 BPM to Psy Trance at 170 BPM. My favorite trick was slowing down Fat Joe and speeding up Infected Mushroom and creating monstrosity called Mushroom Joe.
We played CDs which were BPM marked by the head DJ at the time, maually. It took him hours every week to update the music collection. So you had to be rigid about how you place the CDs in the case, not to make life harder for him or the other DJs.
- First BPM
- Then alphabetical (most of the time)
- Then by genre.
For a DJ that takes requests, which we did, that meant having an impeccable memory, and sense of direction in the CD box.
It was hard work, but I loved it.
Then one day, the head DJ decided to digitalise the equipment and switched to a Traktor set up from Nativ Instruments, all the tracks digitalized and put in a searchable playlist on a computer. So now we had a computer screen, the Traktor set up and automatic BMP search.
You’d think that it would be the dream, right!
NOPE!
For me, it changed the dynamics of how I related to the music, of how I planned my set list, and how I kept track of the next song I was playing. Since I was so used to having the CD tray open, and a CD standing on top of the side I wasn’t playing on, I never accidentally paused or stopped a track I was playing.

One of the most embarrising things you can do as a DJ is to have a dancfloor go silent, and the new digitalised solution, made that happen a lot.
I had a hard time keeping the tracks apart, finding which settings to push and not push.
Instead of listening to the beat and connecting to it, I stared at a screen and lost where I was in the song.
This took over, and all the other aspects that improved; like instant BPM search, automatic beat mash, and ability to change the key of a song easily, got lost in my frustration.
I quit trying to be a DJ, I wan’t good at it anymore and learning something new wasn’t fun. It just added stress.
This is why I can related to caregivers in health care who look at me with side eyes when I approach them with new automated solutions and digitalisation efforts.
If a solution disrupts your way of working, it’s going to be unwelcome. No matter how much it may or may not improve your work load.

So in order not to have them meet the same digital demons as I once did, I’d:
- Avoid quick implementation and changes — train the staff before the tech arrives.
- Change the process, not the tools. Think of the physical and mental barriers that might arise from using a new digital solution in a otherwise analogue environment.
- Involve the future users in the development of the solution, even if it’s a packaged solution. The illusion of autonomy is better than no autonomy when it comes to change.
- Educate. Giving someone a new tool without properly educating them and giving them resources to educate themselves leads to very low probability of the system being used. Always make a tutorial and be hands on with helping people get familiar with a new solution.
Just because something is “better” and will eventually make the work process better along the way, doesn’t means it’s always easier. In a perfect world, with the best product it’s both: EASY and BETTER. But have patients with the users for whom the solution isn’t both!
