The health industry is one of Australia’s most rapidly expanding sectors. The healthcare sector is the third fastest growing in Australia, with an enormous 12% compound annual growth rate. Not to mention, healthcare and social assistance accounts for more than half of the net annual increase in businesses in the country.
Fueled by an ongoing pandemic and an aging population, the trend of rapid growth is putting increasing pressure on healthcare organisations to provide greater care while managing ballooning costs. The Australian Medical Association has warned that even an 80%rate of double dose vaccination for COVID-19 will not be enough for hospitals and healthcare providers to cope with giving adequate care to patients.
Healthcare organisations need to adopt new solutions that allow them to optimise organisational efficiency and productivity, attract and retain the best talent, and manage increasingly complex regulatory and insurance processes.
According to the National Digital Health Strategy, digital technology is transforming both the quality and sustainability of healthcare, which can already be seen in other countries such as the United States (U.S.).
The Roche Diagnostics Implementation Program office serves the needs of a diverse and expansive customer base in North America. To best serve their customers, which range from general physicians to large national laboratories, research institutions and academic centres, the team needed to embrace the rapid changes in technology.
By adopting work management technology, Roche was able to demand prioritisation and use of COVID-19 diagnostic and antibody tests in the US, allowing distribution to the areas in greatest need and rapid reporting of pandemic data to federal health authorities.
Managing a dynamic situation with real-time data
In its 2020 year in review of healthcare, Mckinsey highlighted that there is a crucial need for real-time data on patients, especially those presenting with symptoms of COVID-19. Solutions that facilitate real-time data exchange can improve care as it is delivered, rather than just retrospectively to see what might have been done differently.
Roche Diagnostics used Smartsheet to manage distribution and data-gathering for its diagnostic and antibody tests for COVID-19. One of the most important elements of Roche Diagnostics’s Smartsheet solution was simplifying the process of compiling and reporting real-time data to federal health authorities, including the White House coronavirus task force.
The seamless and highly automated data management capabilities of Smartsheet allowed for fast analysis of production and order figures, status and location of shipments, and epidemiological data to dynamically determine which areas were of highest priority for the next wave of product deliveries.
Powering agility and innovation
Healthcare organisations must be able to balance a stable foundation of core processes and capabilities with the ability to dynamically redeploy those capabilities to address emerging challenges and opportunities.
Nearly 80% of healthcare executives say their organisations need to be more agile, but only 30% are familiar with agile innovation. Furthermore, 75% of executives say their agile teams perform better or significantly better than traditional teams do. Agility will be an increasingly critical capability moving forward, given the industry’s turbulence, complexity, and accelerating speed of change.
Agility can enable healthcare companies to adapt quickly without requiring a full-scale redesign. Since the start of the pandemic, Roche Diagnostics has regularly seen more than 100,000 tests administered each day across the U.S. Using a collaborative work platform, the company communicates more effectively across teams, even as a large number of employees are working remotely. By developing the ongoing capacity to change, healthcare companies can acquire the flexibility and dynamism needed to respond as the landscape shifts.
Integration and ease of use
PWC’s Global Top Health Industry Issues 2021 report found that many healthcare organisations found it difficult to access the basic information they needed to respond to the pandemic in its early stages. Because healthcare projects and processes often involve multiple teams across locations and time zones, access to a single source of truth is paramount in meeting deadlines with minimal disruption.
Roche Diagnostics needed a way to identify the communities with the greatest immediate need and direct supplies to them, and to pivot quickly as those priorities evolved. Smartsheet’s connectivity allowed Roche Diagnostics to integrate other systems of record around the company to share data and processes. This led to the development of information flows and workflows that existing solutions were not able to meet. This resulted in productivity increases within the product project management organisation of between 30-40%, ensuring Roche Diagnostics delivered products to the communities most in need within the expected timeframe.
With Smartsheet – the enterprise platform for dynamic work – you can make the move to more efficient project management today with our 30-day free trial that comes with access to many pre-structured and customisable templates. Streamline your projects by following these best practices to increase consistency, from project initiation to completion.