Saving Lives: What Can Digital Transformation Do for You?
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Every second counts when news of a medical emergency breaks. For Partners In Health, time means the difference between a life saved and a life lost. An international medical charity that provides healthcare to the poor and vulnerable, Partners In Health (PIH) recognized the vital role immediate and reliable communication played in their mission. They also recognized how the marriage of 21st century healthcare with 21st century technology could exponentially increase the quality and quantity of healthcare they provided to underserved communities across the globe.
Technology = Time = Life
In this video interview, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joia Mukherjee explains how PIH progressed from considering how technology could empower their work to imagining how technology could power a transformation into the international healthcare force they are today.
Presently, PIH is in 10 countries with more than 16,000 employees, empowering local care workers and communities while also running a referral hospital enterprise. Yet getting to this stage was a journey. To realize their vision, PIH had to fight challenges as fundamental as a total lack of internet access, no common means for their employees to communicate, and paper databases frequently lost or wiped out by natural disasters.
Setting Out on the Journey
While recognizing technology’s potential value to their business was a key step, successful implementation was another. PIH knew that its employees were fighters and change-advocates, however they also needed individual solutions and independence to decide what was best for their patients. These characteristics were reinforced by the horizontal organizational structure of PIH as well as lingering memories from undependable telehealth technology used in the past. To change their means of doing business, PIH needed their employees to see that these new ideas would work and would be reliable.
PIH sought out members of their organization that had the potential to be leaders and champions. Several employees showed an already existing eagerness to adopt certain technologies, such as SharePoint and Skype. PIH facilitated these early adopters and used their proven success to make the case to more skeptical members of their organization. The actual roll-out of the technologies involved little training: each platform was logical and intuitive. Once the basic principles were laid out, employees saw results and were quickly won over.
The real power in helping organizations understand change or roll out new technology is not so much the technology itself, but the business case that gets solved or the business applications that get empowered by the technology. As PIH makes an even more incredible impact in their patients’ lives, they are committed to being a continued voice for the underserved. Listen to the specifics of how technology improved the quality of care Partners In Health gives and what’s next for them.
