Why the participation of clinicians is essential to stimulate hospital innovation

It is not a secret for anyone that the health care industry has experienced a rapid innovation but a questionable adoption in the past decade. Sometimes I even found myself doubting the technology that my hospitals encouraged us to adopt. This often seems to be informed after a decision was made to choose a solution “out of the shelf” of our electronic health file (DSE) which is “fairly good”. Several times, the “fairly good” solution is poorly designed, clumsy to use and lack of incentive or strengthening to change behavior, so that clinicians like me do not use them. And it is not for a lack of desire to engage, they simply do not work well enough to assert the trouble. While many advances in DSE tools like MYCHART D’EPIC and large language models (LLM) are progressive and exciting, not an insignificant number of them are not the brand for surgeons and what would really improve our daily experience to improve our patient care practices.

However, the problem does not reside in the capacities of these tools – many have shown a promise to disrupt the status quo of health operations and improve the life of health personnel. The real problem for clinicians lies in the lack of collaboration and inclusion throughout the development process with health systems and solutions developers.

Today AI solutions are often designed and implemented with a limited contribution from clinicians, limiting adoption and real impact. In other areas, however, this has not been the case. Consider the space of medical devices. The United States has long been a leader in this space, and developed products have been transformed for patient care and the daily life of surgeons. Why was that the case? I would say that the success of this industry was based on the depth of the relationship between surgeons and industry partners.

For example, new tools such as surgical augmented reality glasses (AR), which included the participation of the surgeon through the stages of development, disrupt the teaching of complex surgeries and are promising to significantly improve surgical planning and the technique for orthopedia and neurosurgery. Unlike robotic surgery, this product was designed with and for surgeons. And like robotics, when it solves an important need and is the best in breed, we can expect surgeons around the world to adopt new technology. The problem is that our technical colleagues know how to build beautiful products, but most did not work in the four walls of health care, very rarely in the operating room. Consequently, they do not know what will work or what is enough to stimulate commitment. This is why they need our calibration, and the best are looking for it.

The ultimate truth is that the development of an appropriate solution requires a partnership: between clinicians and technologists.

Why has collaboration collapsed?

On the one hand, medical software has been treated differently from medical devices, even if the health operations that software affects an equal impact on the quality of patients to physical tools that we use between closing and cutting. The other is that the default position for some has been to accept everything that the DSE offers as “good enough” without checking whether or not responds to the need to stimulate clinical adoption. Too often, there is a blind faith that the DSE can be the best in everything, instead of adopting an open and curious state of mind that welcomes competition as a vehicle to drive advancement.

To be fair, there are light points inside the health system, with certain technologists that TO DO Actively listen to their clinicians, look for what is optimal, not just what is perceived as easy and actively engage the partner community with an open mind. As clinicians, we also have some responsibility. The sad truth is that there has been a certain disillusionment on the part of the surgeons who have lost the faith that a real change will be made after spending hours giving comments in endless committees. These committees often do not deliver the change that clinicians are looking for. At best, DSE suppliers will take what we ask for and give us half an ideal solution, and at worst, we promise to provide a complete solution that will be delivered in an indefinite chronology.

Health systems have not implemented the right surgical solutions to deliver a return on investment

On the other hand, the leaders of the health system feel additional pressure to integrate new tools in their technological batteries to respond to ineffectiveness and improve patient care, but they often do not delegate decision -making authority to clinical staff, which will be the main users of these tools.

Many tools are represented as revocations to health systems, but often offer basic recommendations without providing future exploitable steps or impacting clinical decision -making. Take DSE platforms, for example. They all claim to improve patient care by providing faster access to millions of health data points available. However, they often do not have the ability to make data useful for us and our patients. If a surgeon is unable to contact a patient before 3 to 5 days before surgery and has no enough time to catch instructions that could have been missed, such as stopping medication, surgery will be delayed, causing additional distress for an already difficult period for patients. In addition, the reign of DSE suppliers, which push their tools in hospitals, has a limited space for competitive innovation. This created an atmosphere of poorly integrated and ineffective products that hospital staff are responsible for learning to use.

How can health care innovators prioritize collaboration?

We have reached a crossroads, but the way to follow is clearer than ever. The industry aspires to the collaboration and the emphasis on the participation of surgeons in the creation of revolutionary solutions. Surgeons must express their opinions when selecting tools that have an impact on patient care, and developers will have to focus on developing solutions that solve real world challenges in surgery.

By nature, surgeons are odds and ends and when authorized to contribute to the tools that can be used daily, they can stimulate the fundamental improvements of care. A change in collaboration is necessary; However, until this approach is more regularly taken into account, the health care industry will continue to combat the adoption of technology and surgeons will continue to operate in an environment riddled with ineffectiveness.

Photo: Dmitrii_Guzhanin, Getty Images

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