How digital transformation can improve care quality

Digital transformation gives providers an opportunity to improve processes, which can free up staff time, thereby improving quality of care. The staff who work in the health and social care sectors face stresses and pressures every day. There is a lot of interest in the concepts of integrated care, transformational care and healthy ageing, but many of these pressures are a result of not having the right tools to manage the processes involved. 

Some time ago, I watched a fly on the wall documentary about a hospital A&E department somewhere in London. The first incident that caught my attention involved a red phone that was ringing. When the phone was answered, a nurse listened to the voice at the other end, picked up a clipboard and started to fill out a paper form. Realising that a particular health professional was needed, the nurse picked up a microphone and put a call out over the tannoy. The patient would be arriving in eight minutes, so it was time to get to work. 

The second incident involved a meeting between nursing staff and the hospital bed manager. There was a whiteboard showing every bed in the hospital and its status and all of the beds were in use at the time. Many of the beds were being used by elderly people who couldn’t leave the hospital because they were not ready to go home on their own and there wasn’t anywhere else for them to go. The bed manager was locked in a constant battle to find places for existing patients in order to allow new patients to be admitted. The situation was extremely stressful.