Yes, you read that right. There is a small but appreciable difference between digitize, digitalize and digital transformation. We’ll try to articulate this as we go
What is Digitization?
A vast majority of small to medium healthcare providers in the region track their safety and quality metrics manually. ‘Manually’ is sometimes as basic as a paper record, sometimes is an excel sheet and some other times it’s a Google form. We categorize all of these as manual. The effort required by a single person to track and maintain this data is significant. Moving from a paper record to a digital record is simply digitization. That is, you made the record accessible as data. But digitization, by itself, doesn’t solve the problem of manual effort involved. It still is an excellent first step to take.
What is Digitalization?
On the other hand, digitalization is to enable an organizational process on top of digitized data. It involves a slight rethinking of how to transform the process to suit an online world.
“Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities,” according to Gartner’s glossary.
Digitalization will be a crucial tool in enabling better decision-making and better improvement programs across the organization. This usually federates the data collection across stakeholders with each performing their portion of the workflow. Alongside collecting valuable and insightful data, digitalization can reduce a lot of time for anyone involved in the quality and safety workflow
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is beyond Digitalization. Digital transformation is not entirely only technology. Although IT will play an important role in driving digital transformation strategy, the work of implementing and adapting to the massive changes that go along with digital transformation falls to everyone.
Digital transformation is essentially about the customer and how you fundamentally change your way of operations and deliver value to customers. It is a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo.
There is no magic formula for the digital transformation project to be successful, as all digitalization projects need to be customized to your specific situation.
Our QUASR imbibes both digitization and digitalization incident reporting system that offers comprehensive features for patient safety industry.
