Statistically speaking, the more digitally mature you are as a general practice, the more likely you will be to survive and even thrive, but like most things digital, it’s complicated.
While a causal link hasn’t been established, according to digital health data expert, Semantic Consulting’s CEO Tim Blake, the more your practice understands how to manage data and deploy it, the more sustainable your practice will be.
Furthermore, practices that are more digitally mature tend to acquire and deploy digital knowledge faster than less mature practices, and therefore are starting to put more and more distance between themselves and the laggards.
In other words, they are accelerating away from the pack, and in doing so, are building in a manner that generally makes them more profitable and more sustainable.
That’s just a small slice of the findings of some seminal longitudinal research work Mr Blake presented today at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health’s Primary Care Digitally Connected conference in Sydney.
The research has been done for a few select primary health networks. It’s on the importance of understanding digital maturity in order to understand how to more effectively engage with practices in developing digital skills, and how the practices can better manage digital transformation.
“We have a fundamental belief that digital health makes healthcare better: safer, higher quality, more efficient, more accessible, more equitable, all of those things,” Mr Blake told the conference.
“And yet, let’s be honest, the business case for digital health does not really exist at a large scale.”
Mr Blake is under the hood with a lot of data on a lot of practices from a few PHNs trying to understand the case for digital development at scale.
A key finding, which he doesn’t push because he’s wary that he hasn’t proved a causal link yet, and the data is nuanced, is that the more digitally mature a practice is, the more sustainable it will statistically be, and the more commercially successful.
Practice managers and owners should be taking notes.
More digital literacy is driving better businesses, and those businesses tend to be accelerating away from practices that are less mature.
Not that Mr Blake thinks that is a particularly good thing. He’s very worried that the current way government is educating, funding and regulating the development of digital health across the sector is going to lead to a two-tiered digital GP sector, with the digital haves and the have nots.
The problem with such a scenario, points out Mr Blake, is that it looks very much like that inequity is going to carry through to how practices do patient care. Hence the widening digital divide is going to manifest itself as a widening divide in the quality of patient care.
Mr Blake’s research looks at a lot of data points but some of his early findings are both surprising and obvious.
For example, it feels obvious that if you give every practice the same learning material, the same technology and the same goals, that a whole group of less mature practices will struggle to adopt the new technology and understand data and use.
So, it’s surprising that this is generally how government and peak medical bodies tend to deliver digital development programs to practices – in a homogenous manner.
“We always give the same to everybody, however mature you are, because we don’t know. Typically, you get the same training materials, the same comms messaging through the same comms channels with the same language. Nothing changes,” he said.
“We’ve been able to show through our work that there is actually some very well defined step change in that [digital] maturity journey, and we have some quite distinct problems along that spectrum.
“At the mature end, these practices do not need convincing that digital health is a thing that is important. They get it. They tend to say to us, show us how to do it. Show us what to do. Train us, give us brief training materials that we can use, but don’t sell us on digital health. We’ve got it. We’re there. Some of them are doing advanced models of care and digital models of care.
“At the other end of the spectrum, the situation is really different. We have a change activation problem, and these guys often don’t understand why we should do digital health. We need to do a better job.”
If we took away this very basic and probably obvious finding from Mr Blake’s work and started applying the simple principle of horses for courses – having defined what pedigree your horses are – digital equity and through it, patient equity, might be significantly improved over time.
Many of the characteristics of a less mature digital practice feel obvious. They tend:
- to be smaller to solo practices (where capital restraints come into play on digital);
- Skew older in doctor age;
- Skew more remote, particularly after RAMA 3.
Mr Blake is aware that the data could be read by some practices as embarrassing and that people might be seen to be judging them.
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His intention is that the data is used to segment planning, learning and investment to suit the levels of maturity of each practice, with the aim of closing the gap between the haves and have nots.
“We have a spreadsheet that has a list of all the systems, and then all of their features and functions,” he said.
“You can choose [a particular practice] and ask, where is the business case for digital health? Where is the succinct business case that says this is why you should spend 1500 bucks a month of your hard-earned money in a small business on digitisation.”
How you do that assessment can be based on a maturity assessment that Mr Blake does which will categorise a practice into three levels of maturity: foundational, intermediate and advanced.
“We have been doing digital change largely in the wrong way,” he said.
“This is not about value judgments. We’re not trying to say, you guys are great or not, we are saying, these buckets need different things: different resources, different types of approach, different ways of working with them.”
As esoteric as some of this stuff sounds, Mr Blake is extracting data that is meaningful and actionable immediately for all stakeholders today: GPs, owners, practice managers, government and patients.
Some examples include:
- Where are your servers located? Somewhat horrifyingly, the answer is mostly under the desk (76%), which in today’s world is likely a big productivity and cybersecurity problem;
- What practice management system are you using – which can determine a lot of upstream strategy on digital services enhancement (85% Best Practice in the case of this work, which includes a sample size of over 500 practices, and would surely send shivers down the spine of MedicalDirector management);
- How many of your GPs use an AI scribe, and which ones? (Heidi 67%, Lyrebird 28%, which in itself is saying something weird, because Lyrebird is the embedded AI scribe app in Best Practice, which the above stat says is 85% of the sample);
- How many practices have signed up to the Australian Digital Health Agency’s major new centralised provider directory project, Provider Connect Australia? (21%, not bad), but then, how many practices don’t know what PCA actually is (89% … which doesn’t entirely make sense but should ring some alarm bells at the ADHA on how it is engaging practices in the project).
Mr Blake’s data has a lot more insights in it.
If you’re interested in this work you can contact him at tim@semanticconsulting.com.au
