When it comes to digitalising healthcare organisations there are two major pitfalls.

If digitalisation is pursued in an IT and technology driven way, it can lead to painful implementations which leave clinicians scratching their heads.

On the other hand, coming from a use case point of view can lead to endless pilot schemes that never get scaled up – something Tobias Silberzahn, partner at McKinsey & Co, dubs ‘pilotitus’.

Silberzahn, leads the HealthTech Network – a global community of more than 1,400 healthtech chief executive officers (CEOs) and founders.

“Our experience is that digitalisation is best approached by setting an ambition of where a hospital wants to be in five years’ time and then architecting a transformation to get there,” explains Silberzahn. “So, how to set up the digital transformation journey of a hospital or hospital chain in a holistic way? One of the main success factors is thinking about real impact, patient outcomes and employee satisfaction and enablement instead of just what IT to buy or what tools to use.”

To facilitate this, McKinsey & Co are holding a forum which aims to bring together senior leaders from both the supply side and the demand side of hospital digitalisation to learn from each other.

The Innovation Forum, taking place at HIMSS22 European Health Conference and Exhibition, will bring hospital chief information officers (CIOs) and chief digital officers (CDOs) together with healthtech company leaders to discuss the digital transformation of hospitals and hospital chains.

Breaking down siloes

“Often at conferences, there are siloed panels where CIOs say what healthtech companies should be doing, but there are no healthtech companies in the panel,” says Silberzahn. “Then, there are healthtech panels where healthtech leaders say what hospital CIOs should be doing, but there are no CIOs on the panel – so, the idea of this session is to bring senior leaders from both sides together across siloes towards the joint goal of hospital digitalisation.”

Caroline Henricson, partner at McKinsey & Co also emphasises the need for clinicians to be involved in tech transformations.

“Many projects have been run as IT projects that are not necessarily adapted to the needs of clinicians on the ground or at least not fully implemented to the point that they understand and know how to make use of all the technology,” says Henricson. “It’s paramount that clinicians are in the front seat with IT. It all needs to be built for the users and the patients.”

The Innovation Forum will feature pioneers, from the HealthTech Network, specialising in digital surgery, patient remote monitoring, cardiology workflow, hospital performance analytics and digital patient portals.

“If healthtech leaders know where a hospital is on its digital transformation journey and what its needs are, they can provide better offerings, and if CIOs and CDOs know better what innovators are doing, they can better plan their digital transformation programme,” says Silberzahn.

Bringing together the innovators and the hospitals also has potential long-term benefits for future of patient care.

“The digital transformation journeys of hospitals will be made more successful in the future than they have been in the past,” concludes Silberzahn. “If we digitalise our hospitals well, they will deliver higher quality for more patients, reduce surgical errors, reduce hospital acquired infections and a lot of the things that are currently a problem with hospitals that are not so digitised, as well as making them better places for employees to work in a more sustainable way.”

The HealthTech Network Innovation Forum is taking place at the HIMSS22 European Health Conference and Exhibition on 14 June 2022.