1. Know What’s on the Hospital’s Network
Review the current environment. Analyze and measure the uptime and reliability of mission-critical servers, operating systems and applications.
2. Establish and Align Goals Across the Organization
Identify all pertinent stakeholders in the organization, from the C-suite to the bedside, as well as external partners. Conduct a detailed examination of current hospital procedures and processes. Identify administrative and technical challenges. Ferret out visibility and situational awareness gaps that can undermine performance and reliability. Pinpoint under- or overuse of systemwide resources.
3. Be Intentional with the Command Center’s Design
Model real-world scenarios that incorporate current and potential business, workflow and technical process improvements that the new or redesigned command center could deliver to streamline services and improve patient outcomes. Test various scenarios based on anticipated daily hospital conditions. For example, model current ER staffing for doctors, nurses, ambulance and critical care transporters, and admitting personnel; evaluate staffing levels for days, nights, holidays and weekends, based on expected growth or contraction of these services.
LEARN MORE: Visualize all the data your healthcare organization needs in a command center.
4. Future Proof the Center’s Technology
Create a three- to five-year plan that reflects current application workloads, infrastructure, capacity and sustainability requirements, networking speeds and feeds. Then, build in durability, scalability, power and security to support the primary systems and critical functions that will adequately sustain business operations.
5. Prioritize Security to Protect the Organization’s Data
Protecting data assets is paramount. Conduct annual vulnerability testing with internal and independent security personnel. This will help pinpoint potential entry points and gaps in the organization’s defenses, including anything on-premises, the network edge and cloud implementations. Restrict access to the physical command center and crucial applications on a need-to-know basis. Strictly enforce all security policies.
6. Integrate Analytics and Artificial Intelligence
To create an efficient, effective command center, leveraging AI is imperative. AI and analytics enable healthcare organizations to refine crucial daily operations such as admitting and discharging patients, identifying bed capacity shortages, and improving patient placement processes and wait times. Predictive analytics can simplify logistics and improve insights and visibility into performance, reliability and security.
