Merely 5 percent of healthcare organizations worldwide are “operating at the highest level of digital health innovation proficiency and expertise,” according to a report from digital health consulting firm Enspektos. That means the vast majority have yet to scale and share their innovations, even within their own walls.
Instead, most are in the testing and experimentation phase, not unexpected, given that digital health still is relatively new and that healthcare has historically been slow to embrace change. More than a third are just getting started in digital health.
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Enspektos based these categorizations on a three-stage scale that Founder and President Fard Johnmar developed to measure the maturity of digital health initiatives. Stage 1 is awareness and education. Stage 2 is engagement and capacity boosting, while Stage 3 is proficiency and scaling.
“Ideally, ideas, insights and best practices would flow freely from internal and external innovation marketplaces, to and from organizations,” the report said. But most of the industry is not there yet, largely because they lack the budget or technical expertise to disseminate ideas on a wide scale.
Johnmar called the research a “digital health innovation assessment tool disguised as a survey,” as Enspektos produced innovation reports for each of the 150 participants.
“I’m trying to get people to implement [digital health technologies] in a much more intelligent way,” Johnmar said.
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Along that road, he raised numerous introspective questions for healthcare organizations, including: “What can we do to improve?”; and “How do I integrate these technologies into my day-to-day work?” Johnmar said.
“I really view this study as a call to action for people to start to ask themselves these questions” about how to innovate and how to apply new technology.
Photos: Enspektos, Bigstock