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Tuck Consulting Group
Summary:
If there’s one thing healthcare clients need, it’s a faster, easier way to handle the day-to-day work they manage. But healthcare practitioners are so busy, and their jobs are so high-stakes that adopting a new technology is a burden they often don’t have time to address. Oftentimes, they’re used to new technology slowing them down, causing confusion, and leaving them half-used.
For healthcare technology companies, when implementing solutions for healthcare clients, it’s essential to approach the implementation with compassion and a high level of skill.
At Tuck, our experienced implementation project managers have successfully pulled this off for clients. We received 97% provider satisfaction when rolling out a new EMR for an orthopedic practice. We’ve implemented new tools for healthcare nonprofits and successfully onboarded their teams.
Why is technology adoption in healthcare so difficult?
Healthcare professionals are used to showing up to work everyday, and navigating systems they’re used to – even if these systems aren’t necessarily easy to use. They’ve created mental workarounds, they’re used to the nuances, the interfaces, etc. Introducing brand new UI, workflows, and tools can add cognitive load they have no interest in mentally taking on.
A minor workflow issue in healthcare can cause multiple downstream disruptions. These professionals work in highly regulated, fast-moving environments, and any added risk is non-negotiable.
As a healthcare technology company, you can make the adoption feel easier with a strong implementation management playbook. This starts early, with setting expectations — not only with your client, but with your internal implementation and software teams.
It’s not promising them that everything will go perfectly according to plan, but it’s helping them understand it’s a phased process that will incrementally make their life easier. It’s encouraging your implementation team to underpromise so software can overdeliver.
Why do healthcare teams resist new technology?
This is actually a very normal response. When you’re juggling a lot of priorities, crazy timelines, and nonstop pressure, it’s normal to go into “protection mode” when you get wind of a new vendor coming into the picture. They’re mentally weighing whether or not this vendor might slow them down, make their lives more difficult, or cause more problems for them.
The key for healthtech companies is to establish yourself as a trusted partner that will help them navigate the change confidently.
Where do healthtech implementations usually go wrong?
There are three primary reasons we see implementation management vendors get dropped:
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- They have the technical talent, but their development/product & implementation teams don’t work well together, so their lack of infrastructure cripples them.
- They don’t have a communication and implementation management playbook, and the approach of “winging it” eventually catches up to them.
- They don’t have a good change management process. And with implementations, change is a guarantee.
Healthtech companies usually build a solid product that can make impactful, lasting changes for their healthcare clients. Undoubtedly, when they pressure test their product in the “real world”, there’s going to be some tweaks necessary. This requires the vendor’s implementation and software teams to be in lockstep.
How do you ensure adoption for new technology in healthcare?
If we were to have forced this orthopedic clinic onto a new EMR, hard stop, it would’ve never worked. We had to design the implementation to fit into their current workflows, and then make them better. How did we pull this off?At the close of the 7-month EMR implementation, the healthtech team we worked with (ModMed EMR) remarked it was one of the most successful client implementations they had experienced.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
- Listen: Our fractional project managers understand the importance of listening to both the healthtech side and the client side to understand pain points, needs, desires, and expectations.
- Communicate: When you’re making changes, communication is key. Our team ensured communications were made well in advance of each activity so the client staff was able to make the time to learn and prepare. This required us to be in lockstep with the ModMed SMEs.
- Preparation: We worked months in advance to anticipate impacts to the business and prepare the client to move accordingly.
- Change management: Achieving 97% client satisfaction and onboarding and training 35+ providers on a new healthcare tool required a strong change management plan. Our fractional PMs worked with ModMed and practice leaders to prepare and facilitate training, lead the configuration activities, and engaged providers and support staff continuously to build confidence and ensure adoption.
Closing
The big takeaway here is that the client has to come first. A successful implementation should always consider impact to the client teams and their customers. When see other tech firms get dropped from implementations, the stakeholders funding the project often tell us: “I never knew where we were at throughout the implementation or what was needed from me. I like to be kept in the loop.” The simple solution we implement is to establish communication requirements from project manager to customer before the beginning of the implementation.
At the highest level, an implementation requires three primary focuses:
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- Understand what change will impact the client team and their existing customers, prioritize those impacts by value, and make an improvement plan to address these anticipated challenges.
- Appoint a project manager so the healthtech team can focus on their product and the client team can focus on doing their day-to-day operations.
- Create processes for the implementation, and stick to them.
