Technology
Digitalising hospital workflows without disrupting care
· Dennis Angafor
Sequence matters: fix the process first, digitise second, and never migrate a broken pathway.
Digitising a poor process produces a faster poor process. The most common failure in health IT is automating a pathway nobody examined first.
Start with the workflows that consume the most staff time and generate the most patient complaints: appointment booking, results communication and discharge documentation.
Pilot with a single department and a defined success measure. If a change cannot be measured within a month, the scope is too large.
Train for the exception, not the happy path. Staff cope well with routine screens and badly with the rare case at seventeen o'clock on a Friday.
Plan the fallback. Every digital pathway needs a defined procedure for when the system is unavailable, and staff must have practised it.
This article is general education. It does not constitute individual medical advice and does not create a doctor–patient relationship. For emergencies, contact the emergency services in your current location.
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