Healthcare leaders are facing a new future, and the importance of technology has never been more apparent. Business leaders must make rapid decisions and take immediate action to protect and support their workers while ensuring that critical business operations continue. Healthcare organizations can respond by focusing on six key areas.
1. Enable the virtual workforce
Support the virtual worker with remote network, end-user devices, collaboration tools and operational support capabilities.
2. Scale for extraordinary circumstances
Accelerate cloud, simplified architecture, automation, and alternative sourcing solutions to meet unanticipated demand; consider potential partnerships.
3. Establish elastic security and compliance
Advance security to create elastic solutions and processes that adapt to changes in regulation while expanding the ability to protect information.
4. Power care and operations with better insight
Activate the organization to operate with speed and agility, using data and analytics to inform decisions and assess critical impacts to operations.
5. Enable new digital and virtual care solutions
Enable virtual care delivery, remote diagnostics, telemedicine and digital home health solutions.
6. Elevate the role of technology
Position CIO as a strategic, agile leader that sets the stage for short-term recovery and long-term transformation and financial resiliency.
The now, next and future
For each focus area, healthcare may need a sequence of actions timed to keeping the lights on "now", recovering and adapting "next" and planning for transformation in the future.
Now—keep the lights on. The immediate focus for technology should be ensuring business continuity, scaling to meet demand, securing of information, and stabilization of core systems, while managing the health and wellness of the IT organization.
Next—recover and adapt. Healthcare should next consider how to recover, and then adapt to changing markets and operations that will likely remain in place once the crisis has been brought under control.
New future—transform capabilities. As companies move out of recovery, healthcare will likely have the opportunity to transform for resiliency, taking advantage of technology innovation to build an even stronger future.
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