ICIMTH 2014, 10th-13th July, 2014, Hotel Divani Palace Acropolis, Athens, Greece
Workshop 1 - The Contribution of Health IT Vendors to the Health System
Implementing ICT in Greek Public Hospitals:
Innovation Stories from the Trenches
Stavros Pitoglou, CTO, Computer Solutions SA
CS was founded in 1987. We currently have systems installed in 32 public hospitals in Greece.
Having dealt with all those institutions for more than 25 years, we have accumulated valuable - and painful at some times- experience in the fields of implementation and adaptation.
If I should distill this experience and come up with a short phrase, it would be:
Hospitals are dreadful institutions to organize.
There are characteristics that apply worldwide. Hospitals are organizations that, by profession, try to combine a variety of scientific fields (medicine, pharmacy, radiology, financial administration, logistics etc), in order to provide a unified service of healing and caregiving in a given economic context, and that, by definition, is a difficult goal to pursue. As far as public hospitals are concerned there is a framework of strict regulations to be followed and conditions to be met.
And then we have Greece. Greece of financial crisis, with a public sector under tremendous pressure, in an environment of constant change, with understaffed agencies and an ongoing struggle to accomplish many things, in a tiny fraction of the time and money.
Well, I could spend hours nagging and grumbling about the troubles and difficulties of our job, singing campfire stories of horror and battle about every time the David of innovation confronts the Goliath of organizational inertia and poor decision making, but I won’t.
After all, as the title of this workshop indicates, I should rather make some reference to our contribution to this part of the Health System as IT vendors.
Well, our main task is the art and craft of applying and fitting contemporary achievements of informatics and communications science and technology to our customers’ day-to-day work.
In that sense, our contribution consists of two main notions: innovation and project management. Innovation as applying new methods and tools in an existing process. Project management with the meaning that it’s not enough to know the goal. It is essential to be able to find the means of achieving change and monitoring it.
In other words and from a little different perspective, our job is to deal with all the impediments I mentioned before, and in the same time keep a balance between the technology and the essence of the healthcare service provided.
So, what’s our situation today?
Having established a concrete base of interconnected software systems covering the basic data workflows (financial resource planning and monitoring, supply chain management, patient logistics - that is, admission, accommodation and discharge-, first level medical records etc.), we add up to the functionality, making little steps every time, removing the impediments and monitoring the results as the overall productivity, efficiency and accuracy increases.
Electronic payments
HR Portal
Mobility
Logistics – Bar code scanning
Web Services consumption
Our history is an endless series of steps like these, little or bigger, each of them presenting it’s own difficulties and challenges. Adding them up, I truly believe that today the hospitals find themselves with productive systems and potential that has little to envy compared to more developed, mature and organized markets. And I believe that the IT Vendors’ contribution to this result was, is and will be of great importance. After all, we are responsible to make it truly happen…
If we see innovation as an ongoing project, then it’s time two of the main stakeholders, us-the vendors (mainly focused in practical application) and academic institutions, (mainly focused in the scientific advance) work together more closely and widen our common ground. Conferences and workshops like this one can be excellent opportunities to exchange knowledge and experience, explore new fields of collaboration etc.
Leaving you with the thought that most certainly one can teach an old dog new tricks (don’t forget we make a living out of this…), I thank you for listening to me.
