Healthcare Innovation Keeping the Focus on Patients

Transcript

STEVE HENDERSHOT

COVID-19 has pushed healthcare providers around the world to pivot—exploring new ideas, new ways of working, new technologies. And yet, as in every other sector, the value of that innovation comes down to the value it delivers to the user.

CHRISTINE DEVOL

There is a patient at the center of everything that we do. Even for our team. We may not be at the bedside, but we have to work at the top of our license to be able to deliver on time, on budget, make sure folks are happy—all those triple constraints—but there is that patient that needs us, all of us.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Healthcare organizations have traditionally taken a more cautious approach to innovation. And it’s for good reason. The bar is intentionally set high.

Virtual visits, for example, were a necessary pandemic pivot, but they require far more than rolling out new technology. Providers have to ensure the sessions provide the necessary care while also protecting patient privacy. And it’s not only telehealth. We’ve also seen breakthrough innovations in robotics, AI and analytics—all reshaping the delivery of care around the world.

Today we’ll hear from a couple of project leaders navigating these changes.

We start off with BigMedilytics, a European consortium led by health tech giant Philips aiming to provide an infusion of data science and algorithmic insight into healthcare. It’s a huge project involving 12 pilots, spanning 11 million patients across 8 countries, and crisscrossing a diverse group of stakeholders.

It also included a social science component: BigMedilytics wanted social science experts to figure out how all these stakeholders could connect most effectively. One of the research team leaders was Antoinette de Bont, dean of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. I asked her how team members collaborated across fields to execute these pilots—and how their work might inform future collaborations involving data science and healthcare.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

The BigMedilytics consortium gives the project such immense potential, but a project leader might also look at this big consortium and see a stakeholder stew full of delicate dynamics—public/private, cross-border, companies that may have proprietary interests and so on. What were some of those challenges?

ANTOINETTE DE BONT

We stepped into this project because we believed that the development of big data technology also involves a lot of other issues than technical issues. It means regulation issues, organizational issues, but also business issues. So it was a very interesting project where we could work with technical people and healthcare professionals, and we took the element of “How can you make it work in the healthcare context?”

We had two big expectations. One is that we just needed to do it. To start with big data, to get a feel [for] how it can change healthcare, and we had a clear idea how we thought it would change—that it would be more focused on prevention, better diagnostics and better efficiency in healthcare. And we knew, of course, that it will be difficult, and what surprised us is that also the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], the European law on privacy, was just implemented at the start of the project. And that made things really complicated.

What we really found out in this, and I really appreciate all the work the project leaders did, is that they had to do a lot of work that had nothing to do with big data and had nothing to do with healthcare. They had to make sure that all the permissions were in place, that all stakeholders were involved. So that was a lot of work and that also took us longer than we expected, but that’s mostly this kind of project—it always takes more time.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That reminds me of another point you made about the rule swamp, which isn’t just interpretations of GDPR but also just all of the different disciplines and stakeholders. And everybody [has] got their own third-rail issue of, sure, as long as this is done, but then by the time you force multiply that by all of the stakeholders, it’s a lot for a project that was hard in the first place. So how do you address everyone’s concerns in a way that actually also allows people to get to work?

ANTOINETTE DE BONT

So one of the things we learned by doing [this] is that normally, as you said, in this kind of project you need a lot of experts, and especially with the new rules you have experts on privacy, but you have also experts on all kinds of rules within a hospital. And if you go from one person to the other, you as project leaders have a really difficult time because everybody wants to give you advice, and they give you different advice, and you have to bring that together and that’s often impossible.

So one of the lessons we learned is that you have to find the people [who] are willing to work in a team. That you have an ethicist who says, “Okay, let’s work with data scientists in a team.” A privacy overseer that really wants to make it happen and work with you in the team. It is about teamwork and finding people that have an expertise—but don’t present them as experts only in that field—but say, “Okay, this is your issue. This is my issue. How can we help you to make it work?”

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What can project leaders do to facilitate that? Because obviously the subject-level expertise doesn’t necessarily align with the substantial collaborative skills that you’re talking about. So what do you do to prepare those experts to join and function on a team like that.

ANTOINETTE DE BONT

We had to explain [to] these experts what we expect from them. We don’t need advice [about] how it should be done according to the rules or according to the protocols. We want advice [about] how we can do it in this practice. And please come to our project, please come to our ward and see what problems we are facing. So we have to bring them in position, in the project, and in the hospital and then ask the right question. It’s not “What is the rule?” No. “Please explain [to] me how can we apply the rule?”

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Applying data science to healthcare is still fairly new, and these projects can sometimes evolve as they progress. How can project leaders, at the outset of [the] project, provide themselves the latitude to make those changes while also providing enough specificity around what they’re planning to deliver?

ANTOINETTE DE BONT

I think it’s important, indeed, that in the project plan you write that you line out that there are certain problems that you don’t know, and that the project plan may be different in a year, and that you rewrite it. And it also means that the project plan [is] maybe not so expanded in the beginning, but you develop it later on. Now, at least in my work as a researcher, we have to deliver a complete project with all the steps fairly in advance. We would recommend a limited plan with the main milestones and the main outcomes but develop that in more detail in [a] step-by-step approach.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Now, having gone through this, what do you believe is the potential for big data healthcare innovation? What do you think is attainable for society as we pursue these kinds of efforts?

ANTOINETTE DE BONT

When we started the project, we had three aims for big data in healthcare, how it would change healthcare. The first was prevention. We hoped that with big data we can focus more on prevention. So, for example, when symptoms of a chronic disease get worse, they can immediately react and help the patients to deal with that or prevent that it gets worse. Or that we can prevent an acute admission in hospital. So these kinds of things that are relevant to patients and relevant to the healthcare—that we can predict them and take care before they happen.

The other thing is that we want to have better diagnostics, so that we have more data, and this data is better connected. That we say, “This tumor is exactly this tumor, and this is the best treatment we have.” So just improvement of our diagnosis in combination of treatment.

And the last is initialization of healthcare. So if we can find a device easier in a ward, we need less devices and we spend less time on searching for them. Or if we can reduce the response time for acute problems, then we can reduce the number of people we need in healthcare, but we can also provide better healthcare. So this was our aim, and that, I think, is still true, and it will develop in that way.

What we learned in the project is that some data are much easier to use to do big data than others. So, imaging data at this moment is collected in a way we can indeed start to develop big data analytics. For electronic health record data, that’s much more difficult. So that will also happen but will take more time.

Physicians want to improve healthcare, want to improve the life of patients, and they are impatient when it takes [so] long to develop these projects, and they can’t see the outcome. So you need to show that the work you do to clean the data, to connect data, to do a first analysis will, in the end, improve the position of patients or their health or their quality of life. There you have to really invest to keep them on board.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

Crises have a way of spurring innovation, and COVID-19 spurred healthcare organizations around the world to adapt to new ways of delivering care. Case in point: the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida in the U.S.—which received the 2021 PMO of the Year Award. Projectified®’s Hannah Schmidt spoke to Christine DeVol, director of the enterprise project management team at the organization, about the nonprofit’s approach to innovation and how that played out amidst the pandemic.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH SCHMIDT

Within the last couple of years, healthcare organizations have been facing a lot of change and disruption. How did the enterprise project management team at Moffitt adapt?

CHRISTINE DEVOL

My team was in the office, and we were delivering projects on-site. We were working with our customers and our stakeholders, and then as soon as COVID hit, we were nonessential personnel. So we had to take all of our projects that we had within the portfolio, and we just pivoted and flipped them virtually. Everything was done through Zoom, or if we had to go on-site—because we are dealing with immunocompromised patients—we had to be very mindful and we had to follow proper protocol.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

So you’re obviously figuring out this new way of working, and then you’re also having to look at, “Okay, these are the projects that were in the pipeline.” How did COVID affect the project prioritization in the portfolio?

CHRISTINE DEVOL

For our team, we really helped lead that effort on what projects do we currently have already in flight? What do we need to pause—maybe it’s from a temporary perspective, maybe it’s for a longer pause until we’ve seen what was going to happen with our volumes—or do we stop it altogether, or do we just continue? My team was instrumental on the analysis and the evaluation of that existing portfolio of work. We utilized investment capacity planning to do those scenario-based situations with our portfolio committee and those executives to say, “Okay, based upon our resources, our actuals, what can we get done right now? What are the forecasts telling us in regard to the effort? What are those key areas, those key SMEs that we’re going to need?”

It really, truly was important for us to take those actuals, but then also our resources, our Moffitt team members to execute those projects, to really have those thoughtful discussions on what we can and can’t do. And we did see where there were projects that we had to temporarily pause until we saw what the current landscape was going to be.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Your team also launched a new project during this time called First Connect. Tell me about it.

CHRISTINE DEVOL

First Connect truly came because of the disruptor of COVID. When you look at our patient population, it’s a scary time. They may have just been diagnosed with cancer. They may have delayed treatment. One of our physicians said, “Is there an opportunity for us to connect with our patients within 24 hours of being financially cleared?” So basically, they would be connected with somebody that was a subject matter expert within, let’s say, their disease type, and you would get to connect with them. You would have a call. You would talk through whatever questions you had. You would talk through the process. It truly helped enable those new patients in navigating the process, navigating the uncertainty. When you look at where Moffitt was pre-COVID, did we do virtual visits? Yeah, we did them, but not to the scale that we’ve seen once COVID hit.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

What was the collaboration process like between the project team and the healthcare experts to get this up and running?

CHRISTINE DEVOL

I tell my team, “We’re the dot connectors. We’re the glue.” So it truly is about bringing those experts—from the clinical side, it could be from our registration side—all of those key stakeholders when you think about this process from start to finish, making sure that we bring them all together so this way we all have a voice at the table. Obviously, our IT partners, they’re our biggest partners in regard to these strategic initiatives. So it truly is about bringing all the folks together, having those stakeholder meetings, level setting what really is our future state, where do we want to head? How do we want to service our patients? We have great, great clinicians and physicians that we work with across Moffitt. We all leaned in and helped make this a reality.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

What were maybe some of the top lessons learned from the pilot to then implementing it across the org?

CHRISTINE DEVOL

How were we measuring patient satisfaction? That’s a big piece. You don’t want to just implement and it not have a direct tie into those key performance indicators of patient satisfaction. And for us, that’s what we’ve seen. Patients loved this, and they were so grateful that we were able to offer this to them. For us, it was really just as we continued to roll this out, how do we market it? How do we measure success and that we are then translating that back to truly serving our patients?

HANNAH SCHMIDT

So we’ve talked a little bit about First Connect, the value it’s been delivering. That was kind of one innovation to come out of the pandemic. So how has COVID affected how Moffitt thinks about innovation in healthcare?

CHRISTINE DEVOL

When I think about innovation projects, as an enterprise project management team, for us, it’s truly “How do we help serve the organization?” It might be a keep-the-lights-on, run the business, or it may be something cutting edge, super cool and shiny and new that we have never done before. So from that standpoint, how do we as project managers help the organization provide value, ensure that we are realizing those benefits that we set out in the very beginning in regard to those targets? And if we’re not meeting those targets after it goes live, how do we truly help lean in and help the organization get that return on their investment and truly see those benefits being realized? For me, I’m excited for where we’re headed in regard to just healthcare in general. There [are] lots of good disruptors in the environment and truly thinking about how does that then translate to helping our patients?

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

It can be easy to get caught up in chasing The Next Big Thing. But the true test of innovation is whether it delivers value to the user. In healthcare, that means project teams must put the patient first. And on that front, the prognosis is good.

NARRATOR

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