Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Oct 21, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 14, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 15, 2021
Pushing the Digital Transformation Forward in Times of Pandemics: Insights from a Hospital for Virtual Collaboration
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed the private life of millions but significantly affected the collaboration of medical specialists throughout healthcare. Hospitals make changes to their regular operations to slow the spread of the virus while ensuring the treatment of emergency patients. These substantial changes affect the typical work setting for clinicians and requires the implementation of organizational arrangements.
Objective:
In this study, we aim at increasing our understanding of how digital transformation (DT) is pushing collaboration among clinicians in hospitals forward in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
We present the lessons learned from an exploratory case study in which we observed the introduction of an IT-system for enhancing collaboration among clinicians in a German hospital. The results are based on 16 semi-structured interviews with physicians from various departments and disciplines which are further generalized for healthcare.
Results:
Three key lessons and recommendations explain how DT ensures goal-driven collaboration among clinicians. First, we found that a disruptive change requires aligning the mindset of stakeholders. Second, IT enabled collaboration presupposes behavioral rules that must be obeyed. Third, transforming antiquated processes demands a suitable technological infrastructure.
Conclusions:
DT is pushed forward by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the rapid introduction of IT-enabled collaboration reveals profound grievances concerning the digital dissemination of medical information along the patient treatment path. To avoid being caught unprepared by future crises, DT must be further driven to ensure collaboration and requires the diagnostic and therapeutic process to be opened to disruptive strategies. Clinical Trial: None.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.