Healthcare innovation helps drive the future of care forward. It also contributes to longer lifespans, more accurate diagnoses, more intuitive patient experiences, and much more. But implementing technology in healthcare isn’t always easy.
From lack of resources to sensitivity of health data and privacy concerns to lack of organizational readiness, there are plenty of barriers to and issues with implementing new technology in healthcare.
Here are four broad categories of obstacles to implementation that you should know about.
1. Steep Financial Costs
As USC Price’s Sol Price School of Public Policy notes, the cost of implementing healthcare technologies is one of the first issues many hospitals and clinics face, especially those with limited resources.
This is echoed by a study that identified barriers to the adoption of new technology in rural settings,
“Perhaps the most important organizational barrier to the adoption of new technology is cost. For new technology, both start-up costs and maintenance costs can be exorbitant. Moreover, it is often difficult to directly assess the patient and cost benefit savings of new technology on patient care. Consequently, justification of capital expenditure for new technology may be difficult to obtain”.
In other words, for many underfunded facilities, any benefits are outweighed by the inability to fund new healthcare technology initiatives.
2. Lack of Integration & Organizational Readiness
There is often a steep learning curve associated with implementing new healthcare technology, USC Price’s Sol Price School of Public Policy notes.
This finding is substantiated by a study aimed at identifying the barriers and facilitators related to the implementation of radical innovations in secondary healthcare. In fact, this study mentioned several barriers related to organizational readiness/integration, or the “human” element of healthcare tech implementation, including:
- Training, education and knowledge
- Staff motivation and commitment
- Workflow integration and readiness
- Clear plan, roles, responsibilities
- Power distribution and hierarchy
- Management and leader support
- Conflicts of interest
3. Sensitivity & Complexity of Health Data
Another one of the major barriers to implementing technology in healthcare relates to just how complex it can be to do so while also remaining compliant with all legal and ethical obligations, not to mention providing equitable access to healthcare resources.
With the increasing digitization of healthcare, data privacy and the security of patient data have become increasingly important and increasingly challenging to address.
Implementing new healthcare technology often adds new layers of risk related to data breaches and cyberattacks in particular. So, healthcare facilities must invest in robust cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive patient information. This in turn can be costly, which poses an added challenge to already-bootstrapped healthcare facilities.
4. Time vs. Quality of Care
As research indicates, “technology cannot simply be adopted without sufficient, intentional education in adoption and implementation.”
This takes time and focus, which, when applied to technological adoption in lieu of normal operations (namely caring for patients), may take away from the quality of care, at least in the short run. If organizations can meet this hurdle, quality of care may actually increase over the long run, but doing so is easier said than done for many healthcare providers.
Need Help with Healthcare Tech Adoption?
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