As with anything in healthcare it’s important that information flows in the right direction, resulting in good outcomes for patients and amongst other things, pricing transparency.

However, with contact tracing and in many hospitals and other healthcare organisations, there are many information systems that don’t “talk” to each other making it hard to get information where it needs to be on time.

To fix this we need a capability for big data analysis, the internet of things (IoT), online social networks and project portfolio management to improve the ways organisations and communities relate to function collaboratively using information in a holistic system. This usually involves continuous improvement through project-portfolio-management, collaboration and collaborative work groups[1].

To improve healthcare information platforms, it’s valuable to create a functional model first.  The model is a hierarchy of business processes showing care as a multi-organisational system using a process classification framework.  Such a model represents elements for improving healthcare practices by showing where people, process and technology projects create patient care improvements and pricing transparency[2].

To improve care for a community, you need to consider all the collaborative possibilities from the patient environment both inside and outside hospitals, especially in rural areas that are hard to get to and where the elderly are in a frail state. Achieving this requires a holistic and integrated information system managed as a portfolio of projects.

Project management is a common practice in many industries.  Project managers are good at planning and then reporting from the bottom-up so that clinicians and managers can see that improvements are progressing with the awareness of top-down strategies and objectives.

Portfolio management makes sure that projects are related to each other and that each project is contributing to the whole improvement and change program of work.

Healthcare has many complex stages, phases, partners, influencers, stakeholders, professionals, suppliers, and vendor; healthcare can be improved and monitored for further improvement by implementing project and portfolio management for optimised access to information when its needed.  The reason for this is that the practice of project management gets people constantly thinking about why their work is important, how it will have an impact and where the benefits will be realised.

Today we know there is a serious need to mitigate the consequence of healthcare costs skyrocketing globally.  A healthcare system model combined with project management makes sure that institutions and the community at-large are included in objectives and the model shows the sum total of possibilities for technology improvement and the ways healthcare is defined, managed and delivered. A model quantifies and qualifies targets for development and continuous improvement using information and integrated information technologies for patient records, operations, telehealth and telemedicine, air services and other transport facilities and disseminating best practices and innovation.

[1] https://collectivesocialintelligence.com/collaborative-workgroups/

[2] https://collectivesocialintelligence.com/healthcare-affordability-and-access/