As we continue to push the world of healthcare forward with innovation and digital transformations, it’s important to remember to do so safely. All of our progress is for naught if we can’t use any of it without breaking regulations or if it puts our patient’s safety at risk. This leaves us with one very important question. How can professionals in Health IT foster innovation and drive digital transformation within healthcare organizations while balancing the need for regulatory compliance and patient safety?

We reached out to our incredible Healthcare IT Today Community to get their answers to this question. The following is what they had to share with us.

Costas Boussios, Chief Data Scientist at OM1

Compliance and patient safety are basic imperatives that must be satisfied by successful Health IT designs, but hardly the only ones. Truly transformative solutions need to check a multitude of additional boxes including clinical trustworthiness and adoption, efficient clinical workflow integration, cost-effectiveness, scalability, usability, and compatibility with existing tools – to name a few. I suggest that the best way to cover all of these areas is to cultivate a culture of continuous engagement with diverse stakeholders. Interact early and often, listen, educate, get educated, and adapt.

For Health IT teams, this is not a trivial task. Technology teams often create sophisticated solutions, to painfully discover that they have overlooked nuanced yet critical functional aspects that the intricate healthcare ecosystem has little tolerance for. Ongoing engagement with key stakeholders ensures that Health IT solutions not only meet regulatory and patient safety standards but also closely align with diverse requirements of healthcare.

Miriam Halimi, Vice President of Clinical Informatics at PerfectServe

When it comes to innovating successfully in healthcare, your organization has to be ready—your leaders, your people, and your finances. Beyond that, make sure you stay connected with the people you serve. Those who are closest to the work—doctors and nurses—are often best positioned to come up with ideas that can make a real difference, so it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to stay engaged with these stakeholders and create forums where their ideas can be brought forward, evaluated, and even trialed or piloted.

More broadly, I also think innovation-minded organizations should consider ramping up their strategic startup investments. Startups tend to get out of the gate pretty fast on their way to generating unique and transformational impacts, so I think there’s real value in deploying their technology or services—even in a pilot sense—to learn from the experience.

Finally, never underestimate the value of networking, especially internal networking. Regular meetings aren’t always the best time to get creative, so be deliberate about carving out time to talk with other people who share your interest in innovation. One of the best memories from my time working for a large health system was an impromptu dinner attended by a group of my fellow nurse leaders. We ate, we laughed, and we also happened to brainstorm a solution for a particularly vexing problem we’d been facing. I’ve never had a better meal!

Wes Wright, Chief Healthcare Officer at Ordr

In Health IT, similar to medical professionals, we also adopt the Hippocratic Oath — first, do no harm — and that’s how we balance patient safety in everything that we do. We have to have patient safety in mind. A lot of digital transformation in healthcare is being driven by efficiencies provided by cyber assets. But first, you want to ensure that the team can utilize those assets safely and securely.

Caryn Hewitt, RN, BSN, CENP, CPHQ, Senior Director of Consulting Services at CenTrak

In short, they need to balance both. In Health IT, we have to innovate, and we have to evolve. We must always be mindful of our end users. The need for regulatory compliance and patient safety is not an example of if, it’s a must. We have to be conscious of whose hands the software or RTLS-enabled staff badges are in and where they’re ending up.

John Johnson, Chief Information Officer at Savista

Executives should promote a culture of innovation throughout the organization by recognizing and rewarding solutions that advance the company. Through a culture of innovation, Health IT professionals can better partner with business stakeholders to define and implement projects that align with corporate objectives and ensure patient safety and regulatory compliance.

Health IT professionals should engage with the stakeholders from the start, including Legal and Compliance, to define candidate transformation projects. As projects are selected, they should be Piloted to assess their overall impact. Projects that pass the Pilot period can then be developed in an iterative approach to deliver incremental business value with each iteration. Approved innovation projects should prioritize patient safety and compliance. Security design must be incorporated into the solution to protect patient data.

Including a range of stakeholders, such as business stakeholders and healthcare providers, and incorporating patient feedback early in the process can decrease the risk to the project and lead to better results. As projects are delivered the results should be monitored and measured. Defining key performance indicators related to patient safety and compliance as part of the solution provides a baseline for measuring results. Incorporating patient feedback into product designs can drive continuous product improvement.

Michael Armstrong, Chief Technology Officer at Authenticx

Establishing a culture of transparency is an important way to balance the need for compliance protocols with space to play and innovate. When it comes to Health IT, data security and privacy is a non-negotiable. Everything we design and build is encrypted and secure. With so much data being created and processed, transparency is critical in understanding protocols in place and access controls for team alignment and data security. Transparency also drives innovation.

Probably the most important aspect of fostering a culture of innovation is the understanding of risk. It isn’t good enough to just identify that risk exists but to understand the magnitude and potential impact. Not all risk is created equal. Understanding the nuance can allow a team to feel comfortable trying new things.

So many great ideas here! Thank you to everyone who submitted a quote and thank you to all of you for reading! We could not do this without your support! How do you think professionals in Health IT can foster innovation and drive digital transformation within healthcare organizations while balancing the need for regulatory compliance and patient safety? Let us know in the comments down below or over on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!