The healthcare industry is being disrupted by a significant shift to digital and considerable industry consolidation. This is driving a lot of additional work, especially in the technology space. This work is coming to an industry that is already heavily focused on projects, some of which may have durations of a decade or more. How do healthcare companies deal with these challenges? We asked an executive at a leading healthcare organization to find out.
What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?
In our case, we had to contend with a number of corporate acquisitions over the last few years. We had to navigate these acquisitions, without disrupting our R&D projects or slowing down the modernization and digitization of our internal operations and our user experiences. We need to be able to invest our dollars and resources in the right place. We have to understand existing and emerging dependencies. We also must demonstrate that we are improving the business through our work. That’s very difficult with so many different business lines, projects, and investments all being pursued in parallel.
How do you go about addressing those problems?
We need to focus on what’s the same, not on what’s different. Everyone likes to think that they are working on something different and unique and that has led to multiple processes, systems, methodologies, and so on. That creates inefficiencies, it makes it harder to maintain transparency, and it increases risk while lowering performance.
But, if we are to find commonality then it has to be something that works for everyone. We can’t force people to use a system or follow an approach that doesn’t work for them. We have to be flexible and adaptable—and so do our tools.
What do you do, and how does it help?
The tool that we chose to be the hub of our solution was Broadcom’s Clarity platform. It gives us the ability to integrate with all of the different tools that are in place already. This means that we can transition people off those tools as they become comfortable, but still ensure that we have a single system of record in Clarity. It also provides an exceptional level of customization, allowing us to implement the business processes that we want, rather than having to compromise what works because of a tool’s limitations.
We can create multiple portfolios for the different types of projects that we are undertaking. We can report at any level and from the perspective of any stakeholder. That gives us the kind of visibility that we have never had before, and it reduces the amount of time needed to make decisions. The ability to integrate with our business intelligence platform also gives us access to more detailed analysis capabilities when we need them.
How is this driving your success?
The ability to see all of our investment portfolios in one place is a big win for us. We have better information driving better insight. Our users are able to transition on their schedule, and uptake has been great, allowing us to retire old, outdated, and manual systems. It also helps us make better financial and resource planning decisions as we have access to all demand and utilization in one place, and that fuels improved ROI.