The digital skills of healthcare professionals in the Coronavirus era

(by Giancarlo De Leo) In the current world economic context, the pandemic caused by the coronavirus and the consequent lockdown has created enormous problems for many sectors, in particular industry, commerce and tourism.

In Italy, information and communication technologies have risen to a pervasive and strategic role, capable of profoundly changing the economic activities of businesses and the behavior of citizens towards the use of technological tools (e.g. electronic commerce, information websites, mobile phone applications, etc.). And consequently great importance is taken on literacy with digital technologies.

In this regard, AICA (Italian Association for Information Technology and Automatic Calculation), a non-profit association, whose mission is the development of ICT knowledge in all its aspects: scientific, technological, application, economic and social, in collaboration with SDA Bocconi, launched in 2003, a wide-ranging project with the aim of assessing, as much as possible in quantitative terms, the cost that "computer ignorance" could entail for the community.

In 2004, the survey focused on an area of ​​great social relevance, such as the Healthcare sector, having very clear that the efficiency and productivity objectives take on very particular connotations that distinguish it from other economic sectors.

The computer "not knowing" involves the risk of a failure to adapt the specific professional skills to an environment which necessarily becomes increasingly complex and which entails significant costs of unproductivity, for the sector estimated at around 850 million Euros per year; a figure that is of the same order of magnitude of the IT expenditure of the entire health sector and represents 0,84% ​​of the public health expenditure of the entire country.

The analyzes conducted led to an estimate of an annual return for basic training, such as ECDL (European Computer Driving License), in excess of € 2 billion. It turned out, in particular, how the medical staff was and is what could most contribute to the productivity increase of the whole system. A heterogeneous framework of supply and use of health services emerged in which a network is rarely made, strongly differentiated between the North, the Center and the South. In the North, shared governance plans seemed to be more widespread within the structures and the use of digital services seemed to be more advanced. This could be linked to a greater awareness of the innovative potential of ICT and to a culture of health decision-makers oriented towards integration programs in the local systems.

Furthermore, according to the data that emerged from the first National Observatory on Digital Skills in Health promoted by AICA in 2016, the requests of the professionals of the sector were sharing and training, to fully seize all the opportunities of digitization.

To analyze and verify the "state of the art", a research was conducted, through the administration of an online questionnaire built ad hoc and partly differentiated by specific professional qualifications.

The majority of professionals were ready for change and awareness of the value of use of technologies in diagnosis and treatment processes, not only at managerial and training level, was acquired and had to deal with new skills to be acquired, especially technological. For many doctors and professionals, this "obligation to digitize" was seen as a burden. Furthermore, from the studies of the World Health Organization relating to the last 5 years, it appeared that the investments in training of health personnel had been insufficient and that to further hinder the spread of new digital skills was the resistance of the staff to the use of new methods of care involving the introduction of health technologies (73% of health workers).

In our days, increasingly widespread chronic diseases and an increasingly older population affected by multiple chronic diseases require a transformation that passes from a medicine based on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases to the 4P medicine (Preventive, Predictive, Personalized, Participated) .

The growing diffusion of IT and information systems in the National Health System (Electronic Health Record, Telemedicine, Clinical Decision Support Systems, 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Mobile health, etc.) requires overcoming obstacles not only structural but above all cultural.

Adequate training and continuous updating of Healthcare professionals is therefore necessary, as well as the active involvement of patients at

clinical decisions that can only be made thanks to adequate and correct information.

But what digital skills are needed today by a healthcare professional?

Those that make his daily work faster and easier, help him to devote more time to the patient and less to the bureaucracy, such as the ability to use:

  1. voice reporting systems and transcription software, which help doctors and healthcare professionals improve dialogue with the patient, because writing reports is much faster and, moreover, if the software is equipped with a translator, it is easier to understand, at least in part, even patients who speak other languages, in the absence of an interpreter;
  2. the Electronic Medical Record and software for the administration of patients, which support the collection and storage of all patient information, from diagnosis to therapy, from prescribed treatments to medicines taken over time and to keep appointments and lists under control waiting and bureaucratic obligations;
  3. "Patient Monitoring Systems", monitoring systems of the patient's vital parameters through sensors: they are devices connected to the patient that measure temperature, respiratory rate, blood pressure and other parameters and send them to a computer that processes them in real time to report any anomalies .

These skills are not normally part of the academic study path and therefore common and shared policies for the adoption of ICT tools and Digital Healthcare solutions are needed which, combined with appropriate organizational changes and with the acquisition of new skills, produce savings and efficiency gains and productivity (reduction of medical errors, reduction of unnecessary treatment, reduction of waiting lines, reduction of paper documents, etc.) that can positively affect the increasingly small budgets of the regions. Furthermore, investing in ICT technologies in healthcare constitutes a significant benefit for the economy and productivity of a country, through incentives for employment and the creation of new jobs.

If health care cannot be entrusted to digital assistants, thanks to these tools, medical staff could make their services faster and more effective, also obtaining in real time, thanks to the intelligent use of knowledge updated by databases and databases and clinical decision support systems vital information for the treatment of patients based on the most up-to-date scientific evidence.

The digital skills of healthcare professionals in the Coronavirus era