Agile Strategy: Improving healthcare projects

The healthcare industry is undergoing several trials in recent times, from the financial and technical alterations brought by the Affordable Care Act and the HITECH Act to the rise of consumerism and the advent of the digital age. As healthcare vendors have done their best to weather these storms, they haven’t comfortably embraced these changes with open arms.  The resistance of organizations to new strategies is a major challenge across the market.

Furthermore, with the financial pressures of population health management and value-based care, healthcare organizations are in quest of innovative strategies to assist them in managing patients more effectively.  

Majority of the healthcare organizations are not aware of the problems they have to solve when they begin a clinical, financial, or other improvement projects. Rather than guessing, most often than not, the preeminent approach is to leverage the technology to identify what problems are out there and then develop specific solutions to address them.

While frameworks like Six Sigma and lean methodology have the great ability to bring noteworthy enhancements to industries like manufacturing and engineering, healthcare demands a unique approach. It is important for people to understand healthcare is basically a human-to-human process and not a human-to-machine interaction.

Everyone must consider healthcare as a complex adaptive system (CAS), the agents operating within the network are usually semi-autonomous, and their decision-making processes are often not completely uniform.

In the fast-changing world of healthcare, where new discoveries are being made every day, and regulations are constantly shifting, the Agile strategy is absolutely critical. By implementing a strategy from the software development world like agile strategy, physicians can organize and control their process re-engineering initiatives effectively. Agile allows the project team to deliver value to the business early in the project's lifecycle thus increasing the ROI of the project investment. If an industry is primarily dominated by manual labor, one needs to remember that humans are emotionally-driven decision makers, they don’t stick to logic all of the time.  Hence, one needs to build solutions that adapt to any sort of environment and not expect people to match the software.