It doesn’t matter how great the new technology is if you fail to define your mission first and find meaningful ways to engage the people who’ll actually be using the new tools – take it from lessons learned firsthand and shared at ACRP 2019 today (April 12). “You’ll save a lot of time up front,” says Carla Balch, CEO, Transmed Systems.
A seasoned healthcare technology leader, Balch is a former senior vice president of clinical strategy at NantKwest and director of product development at ACORN. She told attendees successful technology adoption came down to four keys:
- Get Ready: Identify a savvy tech selection team including clinicians, business and IT staff early in the process. Know where your data is housed, not where you think it is. Make vendors prove claims. Ensure a technology can screen out more than 80 percent of non-matching patients.
- Get Comfortable: Question everything. Have no “sacred cow” workflows. Opt for a vendor that offers technology and services.
- Get Deep: Conduct individual and organizational dashboards often. Know how well your trials cover your current and future patient population. Good technology should be able to help you plan future trial needs with predictive analytics.
- Get Close: Choose a tech partner that “hears” you and doesn’t prioritize upgrades based on its own self-interest. Connect your contract research organization to your tech partner and assess the working fit, Balch said.
“Focus on user training and continued training,” said Susan Donahue, director of clinical operations at Javara. “I think that’s the key,” she said. Her advice: Return again and again to your users and ask them how the technology can be made more user-friendly.
She’s also an advocate of getting buy-in early and broadly in the vendor and tech selection process. For example, get potential users in on brainstorming sessions to kick around efficiency improvement ideas, she said.
And don’t forget to communicate project wins to the entire operation and celebrate, added Blake Adams, director of marketing at Florence Healthcare.
Balch and Donahue spoke at a techXpo Session: How to Ensure Investigator Adoption of Site Technology, sponsored by Florence Healthcare.
Author: Michael Causey
