Is your healthcare organization resilient? Explore the major risks facing your industry and what it takes to build a stronger healthcare system.
As the world recovers from the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers and systems are coming to terms with the unfortunate truth that many organizations were unprepared to manage a global health crisis. Their fragility underscores a growing need for the healthcare industry to be more resilient. But what, exactly, does that entail?
Here we’ll explore resilient healthcare systems and the six strategies they can use to build and strengthen resilience.
Resilient healthcare organizations can adapt to disruption while maintaining continuity under evolving circumstances. They prepare for, manage, absorb and learn from shocks, such as a sudden influx of an aging population or an unexpected public health emergency.
According to the World Health Organization, the healthcare resilience cycle has four stages:
It’s also important for organizations to evaluate performance during the disruption, report on lessons learned and incorporate those learnings into response plans and operations. This enables continuous improvement and helps to ensure organizations are better prepared to manage similar risks in the future.
Healthcare systems worldwide have been grappling with how to keep pace with today’s increasingly complex risk landscape—including a growing swarm of threat vectors that were previously infrequent.
According to PwC, this is because many systems were designed for stable and predictable circumstances. As such, they are often unprepared to efficiently manage and respond to unforeseen, high-impact events, which may include:
Healthcare is a critical part of any nation’s infrastructure. A single disruption has the potential to drastically change the outcome of medical care and jeopardize patient safety.
Look no further than the COVID-19 pandemic for a demonstration of healthcare resilience. The pandemic caused massive disruptions in non-COVID-19 medical treatments and preventative care. This included routine check-ups and critical health screenings.
For example, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the number of women screened for breast cancer fell by an average of 5% in 2020 compared to 2019. OECD also found that diagnostic delays have been shown to increase the mortality rate in multiple types of cancer.
However, several health systems across the globe responded to the challenges of the pandemic by rescaling their infrastructure and offering new forms of health service delivery:
These practical strategies played a big role in enabling global health systems to maintain continuity, uphold quality care and strengthen resilience.
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While building resilience takes time and effort, there are five resilience strategies that healthcare organizations can adopt now to improve risk management and better prepare for disruptions:
While each of these strategies helps healthcare providers to strengthen resilience, early risk detection is one of the most critical. When organizations know about potential threats and high-impact events as soon as they emerge, they can stay ahead of crises and disruptions.
Real-time alerting solutions like Dataminr Pulse do just that. With Pulse, organizations are the first to know about risks and events—at the hyperlocal, regional and global level—via real-time alerts. They can then act faster and keep pace with the ever-evolving threat landscape.
For example, a U.S. healthcare system with 100-plus hospitals and clinics lacked the visibility it needed to effectively safeguard its people and facilities. Once it employed Dataminr Pulse, it began receiving real-time information on what was happening in and around each of its locations.
As a result, the healthcare system significantly expanded its view of emerging risks and unfolding events and can now escalate the most critical risks to internal and external stakeholders faster and more easily—helping it to prepare for the unexpected and strengthen its resilience.
Learn more about Dataminr Pulse and how healthcare organizations can use it to maintain business continuity and improve resilience.