JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital transformation in healthcare is being driven by the need to improve quality, reduce costs and enhance the patient experience of healthcare delivery. It does this through both the direct intervention of technology to create new diagnostic and treatment opportunities, but also through the improved use of information to create more engaging and efficient care processes.

Objective:

In a modern digital hospital, improved clinical and business processes are often driven through enhancing the information flows which support them. To understand an organization’s ability to transform their information flows requires a clear understanding of the capabilities of an organization’s information technology infrastructure. To date, hospital facilities have been challenged by the absence of uniform ways of describing this infrastructure that would enable them to benchmark where they are and create a vision of where they would like to be. Whilst there an industry assessment measure for electronic medical record (EMR) adoption using the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model (EMRAM), there is no equivalent for assessing the infrastructure and associated technology capabilities for digital hospitals. It is important to fill this gap as hospital administrators and clinicians need to know how and why to invest in supporting information infrastructure to realize the benefits in patient safety and patient care.

Methods:

Using an Operational Framework for Capability Maturity Modelling, devised specifically for healthcare, information use characteristics are used to define eight Information Systems maturity levels and associated technology infrastructure capabilities. These levels are mapped to user experiences to create a linkage between technology infrastructure and experience outcomes. Subsequently, specific technology capabilities are deconstructed to identify the technology features required to meet each maturity level.

Results:

The resulting assessment framework clearly defines 164 individual capabilities across the five technology domains and eight maturity levels in the infrastructure continuum. These level-dependent capabilities characterize the ability of the hospital’s information infrastructure to support the business of digital hospitals including clinical and administrative requirements. Further, it allows the addition of a scoring calculation for each capability, domain and the overall infrastructure, and identifies critical requirements to meet each of the eight maturity levels.

Conclusions:

This new Infrastructure Maturity Assessment framework will allow digital hospitals to assess the maturity of their infrastructure in terms of their digital transformation aligning to business outcomes and to meet the desired level of clinical and operational competency. It provides the ability to establish an international benchmark of hospital infrastructure performance, whilst identifying weaknesses in current infrastructure capability. Further, it provides a business case justification and roadmap for subsequent digital transformation and demonstrates the derived value of moving from one maturity level to the next. As such, this framework will lead the information driven, digital transformation in healthcare.