Considerations for establishing an effective health informatics and information technology support structure.
From managing complex data to navigating the continuously rising expectations of patients and staff, health system demands can be overwhelming for information technology (IT) and informatics teams.
However, with the right strategies you can optimize your IT and Informatics division, achieving enhanced efficiency and fostering a culture of innovation.
This article outlines key considerations and recommendations for establishing and sustaining an effective health informatics and information technology support structure.
Overcoming Obstacles in IT Support
In the modern healthcare IT landscape, meeting escalating demands while grappling with issues like staffing shortages, burnout, security, and compliance requirements is paramount. Unfortunately, traditional organizational models within IT departments often struggle to keep pace with these evolving and increasing needs. Rigid structures and siloed knowledge create bottlenecks, hindering efficient support and communication, and leading simultaneously to resource underutilization and overburdening.
To succeed in this ever-changing landscape, healthcare organizations must embrace flexible, agile, and scalable IT team models. These models should not only adapt to current needs but also align with broader business strategies, fostering innovation, and enhancing employee satisfaction while ensuring responsible resource allocation.
Reimagining Your Support Structure
Traditional approaches often result in multiple handoffs, insufficient resources to meet demand, and a lack of expertise necessary to achieve business goals and sustain support. This creates significant challenges for healthcare organizations, impacting their ability to innovate and improve patient care. To address these challenges head-on, organizations must reassess how teams are structured within the IT and Informatics Division.
Support structures need to organize resources in a way that achieves more with less. This entails not only reevaluating team compositions but also fostering cross-functional collaboration and knowledge-sharing within and across departments.
Utilizing the Demand-Talent-Team Triangle provides a guiding framework for Healthcare IT and Informatics staffing considerations, enabling strategic planning and modeling. By adjusting the variables within this triangle, organizations can achieve a balance between demand and resources. For more information, refer to MAKE Solutions’ article The Demand-Talent-Team Triangle.
The Talent and Team components of the Demand-Talent-Team Triangle emphasize the importance of repositioning, restructuring, and developing teams within the IT division. This can result in enhanced agility, accelerated service delivery, heightened cross-functional collaboration, and increased staff motivation and satisfaction.
Empowering Your IT and Informatics Talent and Teams
Surveys of health system CEOs and CIOs consistently highlight a shortage of talent and skills as a primary obstacle to digital business growth1. However, healthcare IT staff often face barriers to increasing their capabilities and versatility due to limited opportunities, overwhelming workloads, and lack of formal professional development and growth plans.
To combat this, organizations must nurture an agile, efficient, and knowledgeable future-ready workforce. This involves understanding and monitoring demand while prioritizing and incentivizing continuous cross-skills development and fostering integrated cross-functional team structures.
By organizing around enterprise clinical and business partner processes and user needs rather than specialized vendor and technical functions, IT divisions can establish an outcome-oriented service approach. This approach promotes innovative thinking, resilience, and a culture of change and process improvement. Further, it cultivates a “generalist” climate, enhancing expertise and elevating talent abilities.
Fostering and rewarding the concept of Generalized Specialists2 supports the growth of talent traditionally limited to specific application and technology functions. A Generalized Specialist possesses a broad range of skills and knowledge and therefore has a wider breadth of understanding across various areas. This enables them to handle a greater range of tasks and challenges with versatility and adaptability.
Identifying proficient team members interested in broadening their skills and knowledge is crucial for cultivating Generalized Specialists. Traits include comfortably collaborating across teams and seeking knowledge and understanding of how their work impacts outcomes across the department and the healthcare system.
Increasing the number of Generalized Specialists within the IT and Informatics division reduces work hand-offs and delays, while enhancing agility, process improvement identification, and big picture thinking.
Building a Strong Support Structure
Establishing a cohesive, and sustainable support structure requires an integrated approach based on several fundamental enablers. These include establishing common vocabularies, setting clear goals and objectives, and providing opportunities for development, empowering teams to make decisions, fostering an adaptive environment, and providing clear rules and ways of working.
Establishing common vocabularies creates shared understand across the division, encompassing terms. This enhances communication, supports consistent and useful data capture, and ensures alignment towards common goals.
Setting clear goals and objectives fosters an environment where everyone knows what they're working towards and facilitates shared expectations for measuring effectiveness. Defined metrics provide a roadmap for progress and enable teams to track their performance, fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
Providing opportunities for development gives staff the chance to learn and grow. Offering professional development for both technical and soft skills capabilities support varying levels of experience and empowers talent to grow and adapt to the evolving challenges in the IT landscape. This investment in skill development not only enhances individual capabilities but also contributes to the overall effectiveness of the team.
Empowerment is key to fostering a sense of ownership and commitment within the team. By encouraging teams to make decisions, learn from failure as well as success, and demonstrate commitment to their work, organizations create a culture of trust and collaboration.
An adaptive environment enables teams to change and improve as needed. By embracing adaptation and process improvement teams remain resilient and responsive to change, ensuring they can effectively address evolving challenges and opportunities.
Clear rules and ways of working means documenting and communicating processes and practices. By consistently educating on, regularly updating, and incentivizing staff to follow these processes, organizations ensure that their teams are equipped with the knowledge and resources needed to perform at their best.
An effective support structure integrates these enablers, fostering a cohesive, adaptive, and productive environment that supports the success of the teams. Review the following Do’s and Don’ts to optimize the support structure of your IT and Informatics teams.
Do’s and Don’ts for a Successful Support Structure
DO | DON'T |
|---|---|
Organize around integrated enterprise needs and demands, operational and business function workflows. | Divide teams based on vendor systems. |
Decrease hand-offs and promote cross-training to cultivate generalized specialists. | Introduce new technology/ functionality without a committed plan for rolling out and sunsetting legacy technology/functionality. |
Leverage shared services across teams to minimize duplication of similar services and work. | Allow continuous starting then stopping of implementations due to unclear expectations, scopes, and resource needs. |
Foster cross vertical/department and intra-team communication, encouraging common processes and practices while building comfort with cross-matrix management. | Underestimate talent and limit interest or ability to grow skills and experience – pigeonhole talent or discourage participation based on position. |
Prioritize relationships between teams over management reporting structures. | Allow or support indefinite project holds and pauses. |
Seek to hire and promote resources who demonstrate a commitment to increasing their skills and capabilities over time. | Discourage process improvement suggestions and trials. |
Increase knowledge of basic project management and communication practices across all staff. | Penalize failure when something new is tried and does not work. |
Develop, monitor, and continuously update professional development plans and pathways that encourage continual growth, cross-training, and applied use of skills. | Expect to hold people accountable for not following practices or expected standards if the process is undocumented and/or poorly educated/communicated. |
Consistently apply common service incident and work request type classifications for reporting accuracy. | Fail to hold people accountable for not following clearly documented and communicated practices and processes. |
Apply resource management practices and compare work effort estimates to actuals. | Create rigidity and inflexibility in processes and structure that limits scalability based on changing demand. |
Collect and use data to evaluate effectiveness and understand changing demand and talent needs. | Create rigidity and inflexibility in processes and structure that limits scalability based on changing demand. |
Learn from the past and others, continually adopting what fits and adapting what does not. | Look for cookie-cutter solutions and one-size-fits-all models based on bed size scales rather than talent capability awareness and demand requests. |
Celebrate critical thinking, experimentation, and continuous improvement (even if failure occurs); discourage stagnation and indecisiveness. |
In addition to validating your IT and Informatics practices against the Do's and Don'ts, it is crucial to evaluate resource management processes.
Resource Management Best Practices
Effective resource management (human and non-human) is essential for managing demand and ensuring productivity, quality, and morale within the organization. Ineffective resource management limits productivity and quality, increases work delays and costs, and contributes to missed opportunities and lower morale.
Organizations should set clear expectations for resource allocation across different work types based on understood and expected demand and implement formalized resource assessment processes.
It is important to recognize that high resource utilization does not necessarily equate to good resource management. The key lies in ensuring resources are allocated to projects aligned to strategic and operational goals, understanding staff (talent) skill sets, and properly forecasting and monitoring resource allocation to understand bandwidth limitations.
For effective resource management, projects should forecast or plan weekly allocation of required resources for their lifecycle and track actual resource utilization. This should be complemented by a formalized resource assessment and request process for project staffing requests submitted 60-90 days prior to project commencement, facilitating dynamic resource reallocation and data capture for future forecasting and planning.
For example, one organization introduced a request “triage” process where a multi-disciplinary team evaluated project and change requests for impact and resource requirements prior to governance committee decisions being made. Additionally, the organization incorporated a “resource marketplace” where anticipated resource needs (human and non-human) for approved projects were brought forward and reviewed 90 days prior to target start and reviewed again 60 and 30 days prior to ensure proper staffing and readiness of priorities.
Project forecasts and actual hours should be consolidated into a department resource management tool to collectively monitor resource allocation. This tool should also support allocation blocking and tracking of operational work, administrative tasks, and time off.
Service and portfolio management systems are instrumental in capturing and analyzing resource management data to understand capability, bandwidth, and appropriate resource allocation priorities. Review portfolio roadmaps, resource heat maps, and other reports to make informed decisions for where to invest resources and to determine project planning timelines.
By adhering to these practices, organizations can optimize resource management processes, enhance overall operational efficiency and effectiveness, and improve IT delivery and support.
Conclusion
Optimizing your IT and Informatics services support structure requires careful consideration of various factors. By understanding expected IT demand, evaluating talent capabilities, and reimagining team structures, healthcare organizations can more quickly adapt and thrive in an ever-changing landscape. With the right strategies in place, you can unlock the full potential of your IT division and drive innovation and transformational change.
How MAKE Solutions Can Help
MAKE specializes in providing operational excellence workshops and guidance to assist organizations in optimizing IT operations and team structure. We can help you assess your current state and implement best practices that contribute to sustained success.
For further operational excellence insights, review other articles on our website under Assets-Insights and access our Resource Center for organizational discovery and assessment tools.
Visit our website at makesolutionsinc.com to learn more about MAKE’s consulting services, or contact Tamara Pomerantz, VP Client Operations, Tamara.Pomerantz@makesolutionsinc.com.
References
Lily Mok. Using a Digital Talent Management Framework to Future-Proof the IT Workforce. 2021.
Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines. Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Approach to Optimizing Your Way of Working. Second edition. Project Management Institute. 2022.
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