CHRISTUS MUGUERZA

internal management

A fundamental axis of all organizations immersed in digital transformation projects is people (+technology +processes) and due to the restrictions derived from the pandemic, these same organizations have now undertaken subprojects focused on automating the service to human capital for a better management of the same (with all that this implies, from the prospecting of candidates to the control of their remuneration). In addition, due to the contingency and social distancing measures, and precisely seeking the well-being of employees, thus management must be carried out remotely with minimal human intervention in the future.

Likewise, in another of the axes of the organizations: processes, there were projects to automate administrative and documentary flows, making use of digital signature for internal documents and advanced electronic signature for documents valid in court (using PKI infrastructure); This was an initiative also promoted by social distancing measures and in the desire for efficiency and effectiveness of management, with a view to a paperless operation. Applicable for legal issues and third-party payers (insurance companies) to maintain the revenue cycle.

Business continuity

Something remarkable about the organizations was their readiness , which was also proven due to the health contingency. Although the health sector is now the busiest in the world, it is also the most affected, as its operations have increased their degree of criticality and not all organizations (public or private) have resisted. In this case, the axis of technology was in charge of protecting another of the axes: people.

As hospitals are organizations that generally offer highly specialized medical services (among many others), key personnel are also population under severe risk (medical specialists whose average age is 60 years); Faced with this challenge, these particular operations, and in general almost all administrative tasks were moved to home office mode thanks to the resilience and adaptability of the technological services architecture of organizations, supported by mobility and the cloud, allowing the ubiquity phenomenon. This process known as move-to-home began in mid-March 2020 and took a week to reach its operational peak, sustained to date. In accordance with the above, one of the evident effects is that productivity was maintained and in fact grew thanks to uninterrupted operations, elimination of employee commuting hours and process agility (another axis of the organization) now supported by IT almost entirely.

Emerging technologies

Those organizations with a culture focused on the client (patient), who turns out to be a person in a state of vulnerability, several tools were implemented for the detection of possible contagion by COVID-19, and the general population was released free of charge with the in order to avoid the risk of contagion by having to go to a hospital with the slightest suspicion of contagion or with a mild COVID picture that could be controlled at home, all of the above supported by technologies such as AI, RPA and NLP, with telepresence components and digital prescriptions.

As a result of the above, initiatives were created that add the IoT for the automation of patient care through virtual personal assistants present in the hospital room, with multimedia capabilities, communication, home automation, assistance to the patient or to the health professional. health, alerts and emergencies, traceability and registration or consultation of general or clinical information.

Additionally, we worked with world leading companies in radiology and technology in digital radiological image reading and interpretation services using AI, with the aim of accelerating the interpretation process and as an aid to radiologists in their diagnoses.

Seizing atypical data

From the data produced and collected through the technologies referred above, enough information was obtained for analyzes that will take decades, extremely useful in epidemiological and clinical matters in order to generate intelligence for decision making, mainly from the point of view of the ability to react to the behavior of the contagion curve by COVID-19 (or other possible future pandemics) and projecting scenarios of proper management of available resources (considering warehouse and supply chain), from material and consumables, medicines, medicinal gases, hospital beds, intensive care beds, critical equipment such as respirators, access to auxiliary diagnostic technologies such as digital medical imaging and information systems for laboratories, pharmacological intelligence systems and obviously the feeding of the electronic clinical file, to -successively- generate still m more intelligence.

The natural sequence was descriptive analysis and now disciplines such as business intelligence have turned to predictive analysis.

Conclusion

Although it is impossible -yet- to predict a next pandemic and its effects, at least we can assert that thanks to IT for healthcare we are able to create multiple protocols and action plans to feel "more" prepared from the lessons learned and of the effects of a phenomenon of this nature at a global level.