A new wave of breakthrough technology is transforming the delivery of health care—from enabling faster, more accurate diagnoses and predicting how individuals will respond to treatment to facilitating online access to health care services and providing remote monitoring to support hospital-at-home offerings.

But while such digitization of health care is accelerating innovation, it’s also posing many challenges for health care leaders who are tasked with overseeing the quality and safety in their health systems, but are not well versed on the wealth of offerings that exist. Many leaders are also struggling over how to ensure that the multiple data streams created by these new technologies can live up to the latest privacy and protection standards, explains Saurabha Bhatnagar, MD, who serves on the faculty of Harvard Medical School’s Master of Science in Healthcare Quality and Safety program and also teaches in their Global Executive Education programs.

Staying Up to Speed on Technology

Bhatnagar points out that in order to meet the array of current challenges, health care leaders must enhance their informatics IQ so they will better understand the needs, and potential risks, in health care today. Leaders also need to gain a clearer picture of where the latest technology fits into their hospital’s broader focus on quality and safety measures.

“Quality and safety leaders all around the world don’t need to become informatics experts, but they do need to understand the current state of health care and how the technology infrastructure will continue to rapidly evolve over the next five years,” he says.

Quality and Safety Framework for Technology: Four Key Steps

Bhatnagar identifies four concepts that current and prospective health care leaders can think about in order to lead their organization’s quality and safety measures effectively, both now and into the future.

1. Get a crash course on how the latest technologies are being used in your organization.
   “When thinking about health care delivery systems, it’s important to recognize that a lot is now digital. We need to understand this digital journey—from a doctor messaging patients to automatically transcribing their notes to sending outreach text reminders from a call center,” Bhatnagar says. Yet health system leaders often don’t think about the quality and safety of these advances. They associate quality and safety exclusively with clinical care, such as correct medication dosing or a sterile procedure, rather than with the technology used to capture the digital notes or to make those broader connections in the clinical care system. In reality, both types of measures need to be considered. “If you’re overseeing quality and safety in your health system, how do you broaden your perspective to include all of the elements that exist in a modern integrated care delivery network? That’s part of the challenge that needs to be addressed,” he says.
    
2. Learn how to speak the language of informatics.
   While leaders don’t have to become data or technology experts, they do need to be able to talk effectively to the people who handle information technology in their organization and ask the right questions.
   
   “The big challenge most folks have in their roles is that often quality and safety leaders sit outside of informatics. This means that when you’re responsible for quality and safety for an entire organization, but you sit separately from the technology side, you don’t have direct oversight of this area. Implementing artificial intelligence is a timely topic where we are seeing these challenges come to life,” Bhatnagar says. 
   
   To overcome this issue, he suggests thinking about what the quality and safety structure should be and figure out how to start having conversations with technology leaders so everyone is working together toward the same goal. For instance, begin looking at how you think through the governance of hospital data, including protected health care data generated through remote patient care visits or patient health indicators captured through patient monitoring during a hospital-at-home initiative. Leaders should also ask themselves: What different scenarios must I anticipate? The answers to questions like these can be essential to help guide meaningful conversations within an organization.
    
3. Think about how best to define privacy in this new world of data.
   Privacy in health care is an established priority. But, the latest technologies make it difficult to meet the current privacy laws in the traditional way. “That’s why health system leaders tasked with quality and safety need to think about defining privacy in this new world where mounds of data exist,” Bhatnagar says.
   
   Once leaders understand how to help manage the data streams created by the different situations that exist, they will be in a better position to help introduce regulations to govern the collection, use, and storage of this data. When determining how to define privacy, be sure to think through the current use cases that exist, as well as the possible cases that may arise in the near future as technology continues to evolve.
    
4. Work with your colleagues to define new regulations.
   “Ideally, leaders are looking not only to establish regulations in their own system, but also to find other peers outside of that system in order to build a cadre of leaders to solve these problems,” he says. A framework for regulating technology needs to cut across settings and geographical regions. Explore the common problems that exist, as well as the potential for future problems. Think through how this will play out for leaders in different scenarios, such as a rural hospital combined payor/provider system in the U.S., a global life sciences public company, a privately owned urban hospital system in Southeast Asia, a National Institutes of Health facility, or a ministry of health working on national government policy. Consider how regulations might be tailored for different countries, geographies, and circumstances.

Look to the Future of Quality, Safety, and Health Care Technology

Remember that health care is always evolving, so you need to be looking ahead to what is coming next. “Leaders need to understand how technology will grow over the next decade and how this can change health care and delivery, which in turn can have a direct impact on quality and safety,” Bhatnagar says. They can create channels to stay in touch regularly with technology leaders in their organization in order to learn about new initiatives and to ensure that quality and safety measures are integrated into any new technologies or digital services being developed. When everyone within an organization is aligned, the latest technology trends and data can be used in the safest and most responsible way.