Removing Barriers of Digital Transformation in Healthcare
health report
Digital transformation for resilience and better healthcare Gar Mac Críosta, Product Manager for the Health Service Executive (HSE) and Product Lead for the Covid Tracker Ireland app, reflects on the experience of digital transformation during the pandemic and how it has informed a future vision of a more resilient health system.
“It has been a really interesting experience over the last year-and-a-half to see what we could do in the time we were given,” Mac Críosta begins. “We are now in a moment of reflection, figuring out what we bring forward, what we leave behind, and what are the constraints.” Capacity in the HSE has been severely tested during the pandemic, and Mac Críosta says that high demand is something the health system understands it must learn to live with. Furthermore, the HSE must use the opportunity to not just change technologically, but psychologically: “In healthcare, we have experienced massive demand that we know is not changing and we must determine how to avoid being overwhelmed. It is a fact that we are going to have to deal with the demand and in order to do that we have got finite capacity in our physical structures, so how do we rethink the delivery of healthcare in a sustainable way? “Before Covid, I felt like I had spent 25 years adding technology to existing processes and not really making too much progress. We were stuck, not in terms of the technology we were deploying, but in terms of the way we were thinking about this. “After Covid, we have a choice to go back to the status quo, and there are a lot of people who would feel comfortable with that because we
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were safe there. However, if we move into this new world of continuous change, that brings with it a lot of other things. One of the common framings of digital transformation is changing from A to B. That is a poor framing. Digital transformation is changing the way we think, not changing the thing we are in any given moment. That is one of the big steps we need to take.” Problems emerge, Mac Críosta says, when technologies that were considered significant changes 20 years ago are now complicating modernisation attempts. A need to be more brutal with regard to these issues is one that the Product Manager touches on. “It all becomes intertwined and difficult to remove,” he says. “Even now as we deploy new technologies, you add time to it, and you get instant legacy issues and things go on life support. Technologies are livestock, you kill them when it is time and you move on, but we treat them like pets and nurse them, look after them, keep them alive for way too long and that causes stress and despair.”
