Healthcare organizations urgently need more skills and capacity

57 percent of healthcare facilities lack capacity and skills

Dutch care institutions in mental health care, nursing and care homes, home care and disability care lack capacity and skills to successfully implement digitalization projects. This is the main conclusion of a survey with participants of the seminar “digitalization of Healthcare Logistics,” drawn from healthcare institutions across the Netherlands. The seminar was organized by Bizzomate, a specialist in software solutions for digitizing and optimizing business processes, and RPA expert Tacstone.

Participating healthcare institutions were asked about the biggest challenges to their continued digitalization, with 57 percent of respondents citing lack of skills and capacity as the main challenge. They were also asked which statement best describes the progress of digitalization at the healthcare institution. At 34 percent, more than a third of participants say they have made a clear plan for digitalization of their business processes, and have begun implementation. 28 percent say they are still developing their vision.

Charles Bronzwaer, partner at Bizzomate is not surprised by the outcome: “Healthcare institutions are facing a number of specific challenges, such as increasing regulatory pressure, changing laws and regulations and long waiting lists. As a result, every institution now feels the need for targeted automation. Many organizations know which way they want to go, but the implementation often proves to be difficult to overcome. Our research shows that various factors play a role here, such as lack of development power, old legacy software getting in the way, or difficult cooperation between IT and the shop floor.”

Many additional opportunities for digitizing business processes

More than 80 percent of healthcare institutions say they agree with the statement that several processes in the organization can be digitized, optimized or even automated. At the same time, nearly 55 percent of institutions indicate that the management of tasks and processes is still regularly done using shared mailboxes and in spreadsheets.

Bronzwaer: “The decentralized work with Excel, for example, is often the result of a choice to place the digitalization of processes that are unique to an institution partly in the hands of makers of standard software. As a result, those processes are often not optimally digitized, temporary solutions become permanent and result in processes that ultimately do not become much more efficient. By opting for customized applications based on low-code, it is possible to develop applications faster, in a visual manner and tailored to the institution’s unique way of working. In this way, processes can be truly optimized and the custom applications can actually contribute to improved service.”