Healthcare organizations play a significant role in society, and accuracy is fundamental for success and credibility. As technology advances and data analysis procedures change, hospitals face major challenges in data storage, organizing a highly fragmented patient care, security and privacy. Healthcare organizations can only succeed if they can record, retrieve, share, and analyze data without jeopardizing safety.
Hospital management must transform healthcare into an analytic organization where data is accurately recorded and analyzed for decision-making. Changes in the technological landscape have made it mandatory for healthcare entities to comply with information security to protect patient data during treatment. Leaders play a fundamental role in ensuring that healthcare transforms into a logical entity. An analytic culture can only be achieved in an organization with effective leadership because leaders analyze the trends, conduct a training needs analysis, and introduce a culture that supports analytics and data sharing.
How Leadership Affects the Transformation
The transformation rate from a normal healthcare organization to an analytic one depends on leadership. Changes can be achieved through a shift in culture, training of staff, purchase of the relevant facilities and conducting audits for success. Leaders build a positive relationship with workers and leverage the relationship to explain the required changes and share the vision with the other staff members. Once the other employees are convinced of the transformation, they will embrace it and be ready to learn about the requirements to implement it. Consequently, an effective leader conducts a training needs analysis (TNA) to know the level of knowledge possessed by each staff member.
TNA is a leadership tool that helps leaders to evaluate their staff’s knowledge and abilities (Salas et al., 2018). The TNA results will then be used to organize training and empower all employees to have the skills required for an analytical decision. Understanding the knowledge gap among the employees and training them is the key to transformation. When employees are trained on the trends in technology and equipped with the skills, transformation into an analytic organization is achieving.
Transforming a healthcare facility into an analytical organization requires special tools, personnel, and resources. Leadership plays the role of preparing the budget, advertising and hiring an expert to implement the changes. Further, the leaders evaluate the programs with the staff for them to internalize and formulate a culture to guide them. Effective leadership aids in the transformation of healthcare to an analytic organization because it builds and sustains the information technology (IT) infrastructure and offers adequate protocols for data access and a culture of privacy (Chen & Decary, 2020). It is imperative to note that a transformation process is a closed loop requiring constant feedback and evaluation. A weak leadership cannot succeed in the transformation process. How leadership affects the process includes TNA, cultural changes, training, and hiring additional staff for highly specialized data science tools. Hospital management must select an effective leader to oversee the transformation process for success.
Conclusion
The healthcare landscape is shifting as most operations and decisions are data-driven. Effective leadership is key for the transformation as it helps mobilize resources, conducts training, and ensures that the employees possess the necessary culture required to implement rational decision-making. Leadership affects the transformation in different ways, such as conducting surveys to collect staff’s opinions on training needs and empowering the employees to embrace the change. Leaders must also be trained before an important transformation exercise to equip them with people management skills.
References
Salas, E., Zajac, S., & Marlow, S. L. (2018). Transforming health care one team at a time: Ten observations and the trail ahead. Group & Organization Management, 43(3), 357-381. Web.
Chen, M., & Decary, M. (2020). Artificial intelligence in healthcare: An essential guide for health leaders. Healthcare Management Forum, 33(1), 10–18. Web.