A shared idea of what constitutes success would be good, as well as consensus around what the priorities and timelines are.
On Tuesday night I attended a Sparked leadership event and I am inspired afresh by what I saw.
The Sparked program is one of our health system’s great success stories. For those not yet in the know, Sparked is Australia’s concerted effort to accelerate the development and adoption of FHIR standards in healthcare information exchange. Sparked members describe themselves as a community; many describe it as a movement.
What’s remarkable about Sparked is that it brought together a diverse bunch of stakeholders, and for the most part achieved consensus about how to move forward. It moved standards from abstract to tangible, unknowable to accessible. It produced actual output. And it did it without whacking anyone over the head with a stick.
It goes without saying that it wasn’t always like this.
There were pragmatic pessimists and open detractors. Some overseas visitors recently asked me “are we sure it’s going to be FHIR?”
Yes, we are. I say that with confidence because I can see that Sparked now has a gravitational pull of its own. Even if you aren’t a willing participant in that orbit, its power will be hard to avoid.
This gravitational pull is generated by the community – real people and organisations, which is why it’s both powerful and sustainable. It was achieved through a shared, simple goal, a focus on outcomes, measuring those outcomes and being accountable to the community.
This opinion piece is in part a lamentation that we don’t have something similar for workforce readiness.
The DNA of the problem is the same: users – the healthcare workforce in this case – at various stages of readiness for the digital revolution, many of them nowhere near ready to adopt and use a connected care system. Numerous stakeholders, all with their own view about how to solve the issue. Some good plans on paper but not enough traction. Certainly, no gravitational pull.
Investment in standards and interoperability is essential. But without a workforce that is knowledgeable, on board and ready to adopt, we will never see return on that investment.
To be clear, we aren’t talking about teaching doctors what button to push next. Good solutions will be intuitive and slip seamlessly into clinical workflows.
We’re talking about enabling the active and informed participation of healthcare workers in a digitally enabled system. We’re talking about a healthcare system that values its workforce being knowledgeable about the power and potential of data, the importance of clinical governance in digital health, and the risks involved (as well as what button to push).
Related
I would love to see a Sparked-like community coalescing around the issue of workforce readiness – a space in which government, regulators, academia, peak bodies, colleges, health services and consumers come together to tangibly improve workforce readiness and capability.
There are so many disparate pieces of work in this space that would benefit from deduplication and the input of others. A shared idea of what constitutes success would be good, as well as consensus around what the priorities and timelines are.
We also should acknowledge that it won’t happen without funding. Sparked works because it is appropriately funded.
The Federal Budget will tell us soon enough whether programs like the Capability Action Plan (our national roadmap for digital health capability uplift) will be shelved or invigorated. The grapevine is pessimistic about this one. If a divestment occurs, it will be a short-sighted decision, and one likely to undermine investments in interoperability and architecture.
If our good work in digital health relies on the healthcare workforce to adopt and optimise it, it makes sense to support that workforce to do so. I’d love to see an intentional, energetic and coordinated effort around this – a version of Sparked for workforce readiness.
Preferably one with its own gravitational pull.
Anja Nikolic is the CEO of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health.