The health service has historically moved at a glacial place when it comes to shaking up how things have always been done. The urgency of the Covid-19 crisis, however, meant that initiatives, many of which had been in development for years, became standard practice almost overnight.
This has been a “silver lining” of the pandemic for the Irish health service, says Kelan Daly, managing director in management consulting at KPMG.
“Not just in Ireland but all over the world, we saw the accelerated adoption of technology within the health service. The health services had to change overnight how they interact with patients and adopt and roll out these digital tools in terms of virtual consultations and remote monitoring. It brought home to people the opportunity that is there in terms of bringing in new digital tools and accelerating how we change our model of delivering healthcare.”
In line with the increasing digitisation of society, people’s expectations of healthcare are changing. A more personalised and efficient experience is what they want, Daly says.
“We have been tied to a long-established model in healthcare, where people turn up at buildings and wait in line and get the specialist interaction that they require. People’s attitudes are changing. How people interact with many other services has a digital element to it and health should be no different.”
And while parts of the healthcare system have returned to normal, Daly believes digital transformation of the health service is here to stay. “We have a phrase in KPMG – the ‘digital front door’. The digital front door is open now. Everybody, patients included, adjusted really rapidly to these new engagement tools that were offered and we aren’t going back.”
Daly offers the example of the unprecedented scale of the vaccine rollout, and how people could easily interact with a largely online system. “There were frustrations at times but the HSE [Health Service Executive] developed a system that they constantly improved so that people could engage and book their vaccine, and if they needed to change or cancel it, that functionality was introduced to the solution. Everything was running at a million miles an hour and we got there in the end to make processes as seamless as possible.”
Sláintecare offers the promise of truly integrated care across the entire health service and Daly sees technology as being the major enabler of this. “You can’t have a situation where paper charts are being overly relied upon because otherwise how do you get that collaboration between different care settings and how do you involve the patient in their own care? We do need the technologies in place to enable this and they already exist.”
One example is an electronic shared care record, whereby a patient’s medical information is accessible by everyone, the patient included. “That would be a really really great opportunity to make the information available to the multidisciplinary teams who are in different locations and don’t need to come physically together. It won’t be a panacea for all the health service’s ills but should fundamentally improve the patient journey throughout the entire system,” Daly explains, adding that patient data security will be a crucial element of this.
Technology offers the opportunity to transform how patients engage with the health service but Daly warns that it can only be used to support and enable change. “Technology is only ever an enabler – it’s not a silver bullet to solve all our problems but it’s a very important part of it.”