Approaches for Departments, Schools, and Health Systems to Better Implement Technologies Used for Clinical Care and Education: Best Practices

New technologies create opportunities and challenges that significantly impact education, health care, and business. Leaders in academic health centers and departments of psychiatry already exploring TP (telepsychiatry) or TBH (telebehavioral health) must also consider integrating social media, mobile health, apps, and other emerging technologies related to clinical care, training, faculty development, and administrative missions. Successful implementation of technology requires hands-on leadership, needs assessments, participation by all levels of the organization, and continuous quality/performance improvement to support a positive e-culture. Additional research is needed to develop consensus regarding priorities, prototypes, standardization, and best implementation strategies.

Best Practices

• Assessing Readiness for Change - Institutions have to assess readiness to change at the participant, program, and organizational levels.  Programs need good communication, collaboration, and teamwork.
• Create/Hardwire the Culture - For health care, technology use requires clinical skills, technical support, and team workflow adjustment—so planning and evaluation must cover these landscapes.
• Write Policies and Procedures - The overall administrative approach should attend to process, procedures, policy, and evaluation in order to plan, implement, and manage a program. Input from all levels of the organization—including clinician, manager, and technology stakeholders—should help ensure fidelity to the plan, reduce uncertainty, and improve effectiveness.
• Establish the Curriculum and Competencies - Clinical and administrative-based issues related to care include documentation, EHR, medico-legal, billing, cultural, confidentiality, and privacy.  Implementing an e-culture and teaching associated competencies successfully will likely require a mixture of methods to increase learners’ skill level over time.
• Train Learners and Faculty - All programs will best serve their trainees’ professional development needs by identifying faculty thought leaders or champions of these increasingly important modalities. They can link to others through national educational organizations.
• Evaluate/Manage Change - Change requires leadership and management approaches for technology across multiple clinical, academic, and administrative missions. Change may be facilitated by use of opinion-leader visits and discussions, survey instruments, focus groups, site visits, in-person and on-line courses, and external consultants. Inevitable, foreseen, and unforeseen negative consequences of such disruptions require skillful management.

The full article can be downloaded below.