Effective Leadership in ICT Innovation for Healthcare
On Wednesday 18th March 2015 we held
a workshop on Effective Leadership in ICT Innovation for Healthcare at
Royal Holloway University (Egham) (see workshop agenda). The workshop was funded by BAM Researcher Development Grant
as part of our research project on CCGs and telehealth. Panel discussions with
eminent experts from academia, the industry and the health care sector
triggered engaging and productive discussions among all participants. ICT-enabled
innovation in the health sector requires collaborative leadership that cuts
across professional and organisational boundaries. Yet, in the implementation
of IT-enabled health service innovation like telehealth, this type of
leadership model can be difficult to achieve. The objective of the
workshop was to discuss the major challenges to effective leadership to IT
innovations in the health sector and how these challenges can be tackled
theoretically and practically. In particular, the workshop aimed to create synergies and exchange of ideas between the academic and practitioners' communities, the latter including both providers of technology solutions and members of health care organizations, in order to deliver better research impact.
Many ideas and issues were discussed in the
workshop and only a few are summarised in this post. First, challenges to leaders in managing
complex ICT initiatives arise from the contextual pressures of achieving better
quality health care with less resources and fragmented governance and
decision-making mechanisms within organisations. In this scenario, standardised
procedures and centralised governance structures could help leaders managing
change better. An important point is how leaders should prevent too much change
from being imposed. Change initiatives can be a burden, particularly for
overstretched and small organisations in the health service, such as community
care providers and General Practices. So leaders should identify struggling
organisations and help them solve their organisational constraints to
innovation.
Effective leadership in ICT innovation in
health care needs to be exercised at all levels of the organisation. There
seems to be a disconnect between leaders at the top and leaders at the
front-end services. In particular, political accountability at the top is not
effective in committing leaders to create health service efficiencies through
innovation. The result is that leaders driving innovation in health care
organisations, often, do not feel supported by the top management. It is also important not to over-emphasise collaborative
leadership. On the one hand hybrid professionals play a great facilitating role
across boundaries. Yet, leaders’ over-identification with an ICT project can
create barriers to its diffusion.
Leaders of ICT-enabled innovation also need
tools and information that tells them what is the right direction to take and
that help them evaluate their effort. Simplified forecasting and simulation
tools have a great potential in supporting small health care organisations
leaders in making decisions about how resources could be better allocated to
cope with future service demand. Too often innovative leaders have to battle to
demonstrate the value of IT-enabled care and win scepticism. In a context where
health economics indicators drive health sector policy, better care to the
patient need to be accompanied by cost-savings.
In this respect, collaboration between health care professionals and
researchers can lead to definition of evaluation models that are more
practice-based and, therefore, better targeted towards the needs of IT-enabled service
providers and users.
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