Technology Transformation at Scale for Digital Health

August 2, 2021 | By Suja Chandrasekaran, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Digital & Information Officer, CommonSpirit Health

In the previous editions of Digital Edge (Article1, Article2), we have discussed how Digital Healthcare has become a priority for care providers to deliver a distinguished patient experience. However, this transformation journey can be daunting given that most large care provider organizations have a complex and legacy IT landscape. To keep pace with technology transformation, Providers will need to find a balance between optimizing current capabilities and building for competitive differentiation.

The challenge lies in streamlining all change efforts and making progress across the entire portfolio of IT sub-functions, while staying aligned to the overall business strategy. CommonSpirit Health has successfully navigated this challenge by adopting a novel strategy to optimize & secure today’s core while also building and scaling for the future.

Effective technology transformation is guided by a dual growth strategy: ‘Shore the Core’ and ‘Build & Scale the Edge’. ‘Shore the Core’ emphasizes on achieving secure operational stability and efficiency through modernization and strategic integration of systems, data, and platforms. In our circumstance this also includes integrating our tech platforms, post-merger. ‘Build & Scale the Edge’ is about building market differentiating digital capabilities and scaling interoperable ecosystem solutions, tech products and platforms that will enable care providers to deliver a transformative human experience and offer delightful experiences to our customers. As they mature, the two focuses come together with existing Edge capabilities will become Core offerings and core offerings contributing to the edge; and continue to deliver business value even as new ‘Edge’ capabilities emerge.

Key activities under both these strategies are discussed below.

Shore the Core

The focus is on modernizing, integrating and orchestrating data between disparate systems and platforms across the enterprise to achieve operational stability, efficiency, a lowered risk profile, and an enhanced employee experience

• Modernizing Infrastructure: Creating unified network infrastructure, modernizing voice, hyper converged platforms capabilities, cloud onramp, device capabilities and building seamless communication solutions
• Address Cyber Risk: Deploying and standardizing key technologies such as Vulnerability Management, Unified Identity Management, and novel Awareness Training to mitigate the threat landscape
• Application Rationalisation: Simplifying and standardizing a fragmented application landscape to optimize enterprise operations and consolidate platforms across all care facilities
• Unified access: Simplifying Identity and Access Management through consistency of enforced access.
• Digital workplace: Create omni channel modalities of employee engagement, create digital spaces of work interwoven with physical spaces of work, create equitable experiences, be a proxy for culture across diverse workforces. Ultimately create spaces of work where the enterprise scales in engagement and productivity thru delightful collaboration.

Build and Scale the Edge

The focus is on nurturing and scaling an ecosystem of innovative digital healthcare solutions that can be deployed and scaled rapidly to transform patient and care provider experience.

• Innovating products: Building new transformative solutions that will provide a differentiated business value and tailored user experiences. Some examples are solutions such as Video Health on Demand (VHOD), virtual ICU, and clinical automation solutions.
• Creating a Digital Health Platform: Honing an ecosystem of re-usable, horizontally scalable, and highly interoperable services to accelerate delivery of digital and new innovation products
• Establishing an Enterprise Data Platform: Turn data into an asset, democratize access, by Integrating and orchestrating data across our complex systems and platforms to democratize data across the enterprise, setting the foundation to apply advanced analytics (AI & ML) to drive hyper-personalization and predictive care initiatives
• Deploying new healthcare operating systems: Building augmented capabilities over enterprise platforms to support new capabilities that provide high business differentiation such as Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) platform and Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) platform

Talent transformation is critical to enabling both aspects of the dual growth strategy. To ‘shore the core’, we are enhancing our ability to attract, engage, grow, and retain talent by optimizing our organisation structure, elevating employee well-being, and fostering transparent communications. To ‘build and scale the edge’ in a fast evolving technology landscape, we are nurturing an engineering mindset and platform thinking within our workforce while actively encouraging in-house innovation for competitive differentiation. Building a rich engineering talent base and separating engineering from operations will improve focus and accelerate the delivery of our transformative solutions. We will discuss our Talent Transformation in an upcoming Digital Edge paper.

CommonSpirit Health has been successfully able to mobilize and progress across multiple objectives. ‘Shore the Core’ as a holistic approach that prioritizes rapid results leading to an efficient integration and modernization of technology solutions. In addition, the ‘Build & Scale the Edge’ activities are helping in creating state-of-the-art capabilities that will enhance patient and care provider experience. By using this two-pronged strategy to technology infrastructure transformation, we are able to stabilize our operations and realize cost efficiencies while also harnessing advanced technology to accelerate our digital transformation.