How will Healthcare Technology Adapt in a COVID-19 World?
Hi everybody. My name is Brad Hammond. I’m the Chief Strategy Officer at City Innovation Labs and today I’m going to talk to you about healthcare technology. Obviously, healthcare as an industry and healthcare organizations are facing an immensely challenging situation today with the response to COVID-19. With the diversion of time, energy and resources are shut down in normal operations, healthcare organizations are really challenged at this moment in time. And you know, there’s been new processes, procedures, and healthcare technology that’s been implemented overnight in order to effectively manage the situation.
We’ve worked with the health departments in Southeast Michigan for the past year or so on managing hepatitis and that outbreak in that region. And today I want to discuss with you a number of things that your healthcare organization can do in order to prepare for this new normal and effectively manage the situation moving forward. The first thing we want to do is think strategically. So as we’re thinking strategically, we might think about what are our are specific challenges? That might look like, how might we provide confidence to patients that our facilities are safe? How might we prevent transmission while patients are waiting to see their doctor? How might we safely reopen offices? Or how might we keep our building occupancy numbers low?
Another thing we want to think about is who is it exactly that we’re serving? What do the patient profiles look like? And who will be doing what in our facilities? Another thing we want to keep in mind is, what are their user journeys? So what will that ideally look like when say they’re attending a doctor’s appointment? And finally, as we’re thinking strategically, we want to think about what are our bottlenecks and risks and how might we mitigate those?
The next thing we want to do is think digital. So what’s currently available? And what should we build? How can internal software help? How can apps help solve our problems? There are many ways in which digital can help in this situation. And it’s very productive to think about how might we solve some of these difficulties and problems using digital technology.
Another thing we want to do is think about partnerships. So who can we partner with and what can they offer? An example I want to show you is a home medical self-testing company for standardized blood tests. They’re an organization that is working with a lot of healthcare organizations right now to actually ship tests to patient’s homes and do self-testing, this makes it so that the patients don’t have to come in and visit a facility. And I don’t have that risk of transmission at the site.
And finally, we want to think lean. So what corners can we cut as we’re doing things? What must we absolutely not? How can we implement things quickly? And finally, what is our MVP, our minimum viable product? So as we’re implementing a lot of these solutions as we’re brainstorming ideas, as far as we’re testing things out, time is of the essence. We want to think about how can we do this in the quickest, most efficient manner possible, while also maintaining our standards and our levels of care.
We’d love to help you and your organization with each of these activities. We offer a workshop which will walk you through each of them, please reach out at healthcare [at] cityinnovationlabs [.com] and we’d love to chat.
Video transcript edited for clarity.
Chicago, IL