Healthcare Governance and Workforce: Measuring Strategic Leadership, Oversight

The healthcare industry has gained vast new opportunities for patient care thanks to innovations in technology. Understanding the scope of digital health transformation allows organizations to realize the power of interconnected systems that truly focus on the needs of individual patients.

In this model of interconnectedness, each component of a healthcare ecosystem (governance and workforce, interoperability, predictive analytics and person-enabled health) relies on and propels every other component.

Ensuring that each component realizes its potential requires a means of measuring outcomes. In this first installment of a four-part series, we’ll consider the elements that must be measured to verify the effectiveness of healthcare governance and workforce.

Explore the Four Components of Digital Health Transformation

Governance and Workforce

The digital transformation of healthcare has initiated the rapid expansion of policies aimed at protecting the integrity and privacy of data about patients, practitioners and procedures.

As healthcare organizations move to create greater transparency across practices in pursuit of person-enabled health, their success increasingly depends on measuring the effectiveness and observation of these measures.

These metrics fall under the aegis of governance and workforce, the strategic leadership and oversight of digital health systems. By measuring the status of an organization in terms of its observation policy and regulatory standards, governance and workforce ensure privacy, security, stewardship and accountability.

HIMSS measures the efficacy of healthcare governance and workforce within these parameters:

1. Stewardship includes the leadership, culture, vision and objectives behind digital health. It handles the oversight of new digital technologies as they’re assessed, adopted across the organization and deployed at scale. Stewardship also requires leaders to keep score of planning, building, running and monitoring digital health. The metrics behind stewardship focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of a digital technology at each step of its life cycle, measured by its effect on quality of care and business operations.
2. Policy and decision-making encompasses measurement, learning and feedback, resource allocation, and coordination to support governance processes that oversee digital health transformation. Policy and decision-making processes include evidence-informed digital health strategy, alignment of digital processes, value-based health system incentives and frameworks focused on outcomes. Organizations must measure how their policy frameworks support and incentivize performance outcomes and support relationships between health systems and the populations they serve.
3. Transparency supports connectivity and relationships with end users via digitally enabled communication. Since person-enabled health considers the patient to be a partner in healthcare, governance and oversight must ensure transparent access to personal health information. Healthcare organizations need to measure their outcomes, as well as equitable access to health services, data, and digitally enabled care delivery.
4. Workforce capacity and competency assesses knowledge, skills and abilities across the organization’s workforce. The goal or this is to support and enable adoption of digital health strategies that support person-enabled care. Workforce policies measure the performance of a workforce that is incentivized to design, adopt and scale digitally enabled care processes and operational strategies. Key metrics encompass outcomes, value and impact on populations as well as operations.

The more person-enabled health systems become, the more their success is measured by the effects of governance and workforce on individual patients and the populations they represent.

Benefits of Measuring Governance and Workforce

Organizations that rally around transparent metrics across practices can ensure that the effectiveness of governance and workforce is visible across technology disciplines; this is the starting point to initiate and monitor digital health transformation in the enterprise.

Strong measurement practices gauge the degree to which strategic technology initiatives have been adopted by the organization to verify that business and technology leaders have successfully aligned the organization.

When considered in conjunction with the other three components of the ecosystem, they create a rubric to judge how effective the organization has been in putting its institutional weight behind the goal of frictionless, system-wide support for the needs of the people in its care.

The next post in our series on measuring digital health transformation explores interoperability.