Technology Management Maturity Assessment Model in Healthcare

Abstract

Significant gaps in the practical transformation of clinical knowledge into practices, increasing healthcare costs, costly medical errors, healthcare institutions' obligations towards improving safety, clinical outcomes, and efficacy of care from one side; and the rise of disruptive innovations, the adoption of electronic health records and novel diagnostic tools, and the plethora of data from the other side has made the need for a new approach in managing the U.S healthcare systems an imperative. Continuous learning has been utilized to mitigate some of these issues have been in healthcare organizations. Continuous learning is especially important in the research centers that act as innovation hubs within University Hospitals. These centers align with learning and improving current systems and practices in a specific area of healthcare with goals of better serving the population in need of those specific services or treatments. Maturity Models are organizational management tools that have been used as a way of responding to the constant pressure of trying to achieve and maintain competitive advantage through concurrent innovation, quality improvement, and cost reduction. In the context of continuous learning in healthcare organizations, a mature system can be defined as a system that generates timely actions to the information that it derives from internal and external data to create meaningful measurement regarding system learning and increased efficacy and effectiveness in health outcomes. However, there is a lack of a model that provides managers and decision-makers with a systematic, multi-criteria, validated, quantifiable, and repeatable maturity model to assess and enhance health organizations' performance in continuous learning and technology management. This research proposes a multi-criteria model to assess technology management maturity and continuous learning in research centers within university hospitals by using Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM). The model can help these research centers with pinpointing their strengths and opportunities in terms of continuous learning from the data they have access to while giving them organizational self-awareness and guide them in setting their strategies and resource allocation. The model will serve as a much-needed technology management tool for healthcare organizations to assess their technology management maturity and continuous learning efforts and assist them in creating more effective roadmaps.