Week 2 Assignment
Leaders are instrumental to innovation (TEDx Talks, 2012), and healthcare information technology (HIT) leaders are not an exception. Among other things, HIT leaders promote the innovations that optimize and transform healthcare. The present paper will examine some of the key aspects that a HIT leader needs to consider to become a better innovator, focusing on the skills that should be developed and activities of importance.
Carl Bass suggests that innovation can be defined as a meaningful, practical application of ideas that result in improvements (TEDx Talks, 2012). An important input for innovation is the analysis of the available data (Snedaker, 2016), which can be especially helpful for the optimization of the existing processes that are described by the data. Thus, analytical and data collecting abilities, as well as the attention to the information available, are of importance for an innovative leader.
On the other hand, Guy Kawasaki focuses on transformative innovation and, consequently, highlights the visionary aspects of leadership (TEDx Talks, 2013). For example, he emphasizes the importance of ambitious goals and the belief in certain innovations. Thus, a HIT leader needs to be able to develop a compelling, ambitious vision that would promote innovation and engage stakeholders.
Indeed, innovative leaders are responsible for the engagement of stakeholders, including patients and employees (Snedaker, 2016). For instance, Cresswell, Lee, Mozaffar, Williams, and Sheikh (2016) discuss the topic of adopting HIT and highlight the fact that a successful implementation of innovation hinges on employee engagement. The authors show that effective engagement leads to increased satisfaction and enhances employees’ understanding and perception of change, which facilitates the process of its routinization.
Alternatively, the lack of engagement discourages employees from using the newly introduced HIT and increases passive and active resistance, which makes the process of HIT integration less effective and increases the possibility of HIT misuse. As a result, an innovative leader needs to develop their interpersonal and human resource management skills while focusing on employee engagement.
As an extension of this engagement, an innovative leader works towards incorporating innovative thinking into the culture of their organization. For instance, innovation is typically disruptive and, to some extent, risk-related, which is not a favorable feature from the perspective of a resilient business (Cresswell & Sheikh, 2013; TEDx Talks, 2012). Therefore, an innovative leader needs to work with the organizational culture to make it more risk-tolerant, which should promote innovative thinking at the workplace (Snedaker, 2016). The specifics of the possible improvements that can be applied to the particular culture of an organization should be obtained by the leader through the collection of relevant data and its analysis.
Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) technology is an example of HIT innovation, which is going to be the topic of the Capstone project that will be considered in these posts. CPOE is one of the transformative innovations that have a great potential for the improvement of healthcare but tend to be misused, which limits the meaningfulness of their introduction and can lead to safety issues (Cresswell et al., 2016).
As a result, the introduction of CPOE requires effective leadership: it needs an innovative HIT leader who is equipped with visionary thinking, can engage stakeholders, and is ready to collect and analyze the data that may facilitate the process of CPOE implementation. Given the fact that these skills and activities are crucial for a HIT leader, they can help the latter to improve their ability to act as an innovator.
References
Cresswell, K., & Sheikh, A. (2013). Organizational issues in the implementation and adoption of health information technology innovations: An interpretative review. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 82(5), e73-e86.
Cresswell, K., Lee, L., Mozaffar, H., Williams, R., & Sheikh, A. (2016). Sustained user engagement in health information technology: The long road from implementation to system optimization of computerized physician order entry and clinical decision support systems for prescribing in hospitals in England. Health Services Research, 52(5), 1928-1957.
Snedaker, S. (2016). Leading healthcare IT. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
TEDx Talks. (2012). TEDxBerkeley – Carl Bass – The new rules of innovation.
TEDx Talks. (2013). Lessons of Steve Jobs: Guy Kawasaki at TEDxUCSD.