Digital Transformation - The Right Way

By Amit Goel, CIO, Metropolis Healthcare

Amit Goel, CIO, Metropolis Healthcare

A vast majority of healthcare industry considers digital transformation a centerpiece of their organizational objectives, predominantly as it enables them to enhance consumer experience, improve operational efficiency, and reduce cost of service. However, a substantial gap subsists between organizational objectives of digital transformation and the actual results. This gap doesn’t exist because we do not have the required technology but it exists because we fail to understand our patients, partners, employees, and what value will the same technology bring to them. In other words, we fail to empathize with our patients, with the increasing focus on patient-centered care we need to concentrate on a more human-centered approach to achieve digital transformation. Thus, human-centered design thinking methodology is a natural fit as a problem solving methodology in healthcare. Since the methodology is human focused, it enables us to empathize with our stakeholders and also helps generate a plethora of ideas that have a rapid iterative disposition.

Over the years, Metropolis has rapidly grown in India and several other countries; we are among the top diagnostic chains in India. Considering the rapid growth, the company was in need of integration of digital technology into relevant areas of business, Metropolis needed to fundamentally change how company operates and delivers value to consumers. However, this transformation would also require a cultural change, a change that persistently challenges the status quo, innovates, and gets comfortable with failure. To achieve this transformation, we needed to establish an organizational vision, thus we used Hoshin Kanri methodology.

Hoshi Kanri methodology helped us:

• Establish an organizational vision, and align vision and mission set with the objectives, strategy and tactics directed by stakeholders

• Map each strategy to one or more solution implementation track, one or more business process and sub-process

• Determine high-level efforts and business impact (High/Medium/Low) assigned to each tactic

• It helped us translate business goals to actions at the ground level

• It helped link strategies and tactics with measurable results and link it all with accountable team members

• It helped create a sense of shared responsibility thus increasing a buy in from our stakeholders.

Our next step comprised of applying the design thinking methodology to help put ourselves in shoes of our stakeholders and understand needs. The phases of design thinking adopted were:

• Empathize

• Define

• Design

• Prototype

• Test

• Implement

In Empathize Phase, team immersed into heads of stakeholders and recognized what they were actually looking for. After a month of conducting several stakeholder interviews, surveys, observing stakeholder behavior at our centers, partner clinics, hospitals, and labs, personas were created and experience mapping exercises were conducted. Insights and pain points were gathered: For example, patients want easy to understand interactive reports, partners want real time status.

In Define Phase, basis gathered insights and identified pain points, process flows were created and stakeholder journeys were plotted.

In the Ideate and Prototype Phase, solution was conceptualized using brainstorming technique. Team generated and iterated low to high-fidelity designs. The goal was to fail fast and cheap. Prototypes were created and tested by stakeholders and end users. Feedbacks were used to refine and validate solutions. Successful concepts were successfully deployed.

The essential fragment was to link these solutions with our key objectives and tactics comprised in Hoshin Kanri Matrix. Hoshin Kanri process is a course of VMOST—vision, mission, objectives, strategy, and tactics. In order to create an environment conducive to innovation, change, curiosity, and achievement and not fall trap to 'corporate do-nothings', we combined design thinking with Hoshin Kanri. We wanted strategy execution (VMOST) to have a quantifiable linkage from top vision/objectives to tactics that flourish in the form of digital innovations.