Digital Health Innovation Engineering: Enabling Digital Transformation in Healthcare

(a)Situation faced: Digitalization is changing healthcare. Especially hospitals are under tremendous pressure and there is a recognizable difference of digital maturity compared along the European states. Besides German hospitals, Fraunhofer ISST is supporting the Danish Government as they are in an outstanding restructuring process with the aim of building five super hospitals in different regions. The vision, fixed by the Danish DNU Hospital in Aarhus, was to allow the overall vertical and horizontal digitalization of processes by having one common information architecture. Fraunhofer ISST was contracted by DNU to support the definition and valuation of a reference architecture. (b)Action taken: We started with a very lean approach and identified three key requirements: (1) support of operative processes, (2) analysis and optimization, and (3) automation and planning. A first idea was to implement an ""Automated Transport Service"" in a logistical scenario by combining the ""trolley service"" with the ""task management service"". The whole vision could be reduced to one aim: Optimization by automation. To reach this aim we identified the need for a structured process for digital transformation that will pay attention to the demand and needs as well as the competences of the employees. Therefore, Fraunhofer ISST started to develop the approach called ""Digital Health Innovation Engineering"" (DHIE). (c) Results achieved: Making use of digitalization in healthcare requires a structured process called digital transformation to enable health companies, hospitals and other facilities to do so. The preliminary results deduced from the learnings at the DNU hospital were used to define the basic framework of DHIE. Furthermore, we detailed the method called ""maturity index for hospital 4.0"" to measure the digital maturity of hospitals paying attention to technical as well as human factors. (d) Lessons learned: We identified, that the introduction of digital solutions and processes requires a structured process. Digitalization is more than technology; it is a process of transformation. Especially in healthcare, the human-to-human interaction like patient to physician plays an important role. Thus, digitalization has to define solutions how processes can change with respects to its human actors.