Preface

The topic of transforming healthcare is not new. As early as 2014, a report to the US President was issued with the following six recommendations:

• Accelerate alignment of payment systems with desired outcomes
• Increase access to relevant health data and analytics
• Provide technical assistance in systems engineering approaches
• Involve communities in improving healthcare delivery
• Share lessons learned from successful improvement efforts
• Train healthcare professionals in new skills and approaches

(Refer to BETTER HEALTH CARE AND LOWER COSTS: ACCELERATING IMPROVEMENT THROUGH SYSTEMS ENGINEERING.)

Although COVID-19 has put things in motion, it is still, as the World Health Organization puts it in various publications (refer to who.int), the technology to improve the health of populations that remains largely untapped, and there is immense scope for the use of digital health solutions.

Technology is an important driver for change, but in essence, we should design and plan for personalized health and not focus on just the technology. Healthcare transformation requires more than just technology: medical staff, supporting staff, and patients including their community such as next of kin, need to embrace it. We need a methodology to bring it all together – people, organizations, and technology – by creating a common understanding.

This book presents ways to build an understanding between stakeholders and agree jointly on the way forward. The intention of this book is to make developers aware of the models to understand the complexity of healthcare so they can recognize this complexity when involved in large healthcare transformation projects. We only briefly explain what each model is about. In the Further reading section at the end of each chapter, we refer to in-depth sources.

Every chapter of this book has a specific theme, providing a comprehensive overview of the challenges, the opportunities, and the approaches to deal with them in architecture and transformation. By the end of this book, you will be able to guide the digital transformation of global healthcare. The book discusses the impact of new technologies but addresses primarily a methodology or framework for common understanding in the first place. The framework is referred to as Transformation in Sustainable Healthcare (TiSH). In addition, you will also apply Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) principles and DevOps4Care to real-world examples, step by step.

By the end of this book, you will not only understand the issues and challenges of transformation of healthcare but also possess a workable, actionable solution in the form of a roadmap.