In the quest for better patient and customer experience, reduced wait times, and higher quality of care, both IT and business leadership agree that digital transformation is paramount in healthcare. A McKinsey survey in June 2024 found that a digital and AI transformation was a high or top priority for nearly 90 percent of health system executives in both technical and non-technical roles.
However, contrasting this appetite for change is the readiness to enact it:
75% of respondents said they couldn’t deliver because their organizations had not planned or allocated the necessary resources.
What’s Slowing Digital Transformation in Healthcare?
Organizations wishing to transform themselves have a difficult task. Healthcare is notorious for legacy IT systems that are cumbersome to update and hard to integrate with modern technology. Outdated systems can have major implications for security, as applications that have been retired from a vendor’s portfolio may be deprioritized or no longer supported, leaving them with security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors. Britain’s National Health Service, for example, was a victim of the global ransomware attack WannaCry in 2017, partially because some organizations did not install a security patch.
Security and privacy are absolute priorities for healthcare organizations due to the high level of sensitivity of the data they process, as well as the strict data protection laws governing the use of this data. Healthcare relies on trust—if a patient does not trust their health provider with their personal information, they will be unable to provide the best healthcare possible. This goes for the organization’s partners, too—the sharing of data must be completely transparent so patients understand who is going to be accessing their data and what they will do with it.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a huge accelerator of change within healthcare, as providers realized they needed to become more consumer-friendly and offer accessible digital services at a time when in-person visits were difficult. Post-pandemic, at least some kind of care delivered virtually in the home is now a basic consumer expectation.
Without a single source of truth, achieving digital transformation in healthcare is tricky. Organizations in the sector can consist of hundreds of data sources, from applications to patient-worn devices, not to mention the partners with which they share data. Harmonizing these sources and ensuring they match each other can be a lot of work, and errors and inconsistencies can easily slip through the cracks. Accurate decision-making needs a central authoritative hub whose accuracy can be trusted.
How Digital Transformation Empowers Healthcare Providers
With all the pressures and challenges faced by healthcare organizations, how can they ensure their data stays accurate and secure while keeping patient and customer experience paramount?
The industry is turning to Enterprise Architecture (EA) to ensure technology aligns with organizational strategy. Well-designed enterprise architecture helps organizations be more efficient, able to make better use of resources, and ultimately deliver better care outcomes.
Some healthcare clients who use Ardoq include:
- BUPA
- Nebraska Medicine
- NHS Dorset
- University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG)
We also have numerous clients in subsectors including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and hospital care.
Bupa: Accelerating Delivery of Strategic Initiatives
Bupa is a leading global health insurance and care company with 50 million customers worldwide. Based principally in the UK, the organization also operates in locations such as Australia, Spain, Chile, Poland, New Zealand, Hong Kong SAR, Türkiye, Brazil, Mexico, the US, the Middle East, and Ireland.
Bupa aims to become the most customer-centric healthcare company in the world. To achieve this, they identified three activities they needed to accomplish:
- Increasing the percentage of customers interacting with Bupa digitally and serving customers with immediate access to healthcare.
- Facilitating knowledge-sharing and collaboration across a federated organization.
- Eliminating technology and development duplication between business entities.
Bupa matched their business and technical capabilities with their technology estate using Ardoq’s out-of-the-box solutions for Application Portfolio Management and Business Capability Modeling. This allowed them to understand where technology is a strategic fit and to identify gaps using dynamic roadmaps. Ardoq’s features for communicating with stakeholders allowed them to easily share information and architectural designs across teams, even to non-technical decision-makers.
“We rely less on knowledge, only being in the heads of key people, and we are able to share more information about the systems we are working on and the impact of changing them. That helps us get better decisions made faster.”
- Stephen Marchant, Global Enterprise Architect at Bupa
Learn more about how Ardoq helped Bupa by reading the full story.
Nebraska Medicine: Dynamic Insights to Guide Organizational Strategy
Nebraska Medicine is an American not-for-profit healthcare company based in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. They own two major hospitals in the Nebraska area, including Nebraska Medical Center, the state’s largest hospital, as well as 39 specialty and primary care clinics in and around Omaha. They are also a teaching partner with University of Nebraska Medical Center.
With Ardoq, they have been able to bridge important communication gaps, helping them to see how everything fits together. By mapping their application portfolio in Ardoq, they have been able to add structure and capture information more easily. This helps them understand which applications are critical and where to invest.
“I’m able to build visualizations for the Hospital’s Vice President, who can go to discussions armed with data. This enables higher-level executives to make good decisions without needing to know all the details.”
Enterprise Architect at Nebraska Medicine
University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG): Aligning IT to Business
University Medical Centre Groningen is the main hospital in the city of Groningen, The Netherlands. It provides tertiary care to the northern part of the country and is one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands and the largest employer in the region.
As UMCG grew, the gap between IT and business increased. They needed:
- A common language between stakeholders and the EA team.
- A common program and full stack visualization.
- A roadmap to show the future state and map out a sustainable transformation journey to reach it.
Ardoq’s platform was accessible enough for everyone in their IT architecture to pick up. The platform’s automation features enabled them to maintain the as-is state, freeing the team up to work on data quality and the future state.
“One of the biggest advantages of Ardoq is that it has less architectural rigidity and dogmatics than other tools. We actually edit concepts from the business. By using capabilities that are pretty open, we invite the business owners to guide us instead of us explaining what we're doing. And that helps acceptance as well.”
- Jan-Joost van Walsum, Lead Enterprise Architect at UMCG
UMCG has particularly strengthened their strategic capabilities using Ardoq’s business capability modeling.
By defining their business capabilities and aligning them to their strategic goals, the organization has been able to understand how departments such as Research, AI Development, and Human Resources can align their projects and activities to ensure maximum impact. The EA team presents information on the performance of capabilities to stakeholders using Scenarios. This allows them to make informed decisions about resource investment depending on their importance to the business.
See the full case study of how UMCG achieved this by mapping both tangible and intangible capabilities.
"I'm not a physician. I can't cure people, but I can help improve information flow so patients have better health outcomes."
- Jan-Joost van Walsum
Large US Health System
This US health system is using Ardoq to gain a handle on their current IT state using Ardoq’s Application Portfolio Management capabilities, with a view to conducting Application Rationalization and app and cloud modernization.
“Our EA platform is tremendously valuable. We implemented it swiftly and immediately saw benefits. Using Ardoq's solutions, like Strategy to Execution, we modeled our environment, including strategy, capabilities, and projects. The seamless integrations from other source systems allow us to regularly update applications, people, and our organizational model. The key advantage is the ability to quickly create models and viewpoints that are automatically updated as the data changes. This significantly enhanced our team's effectiveness, enabling us to deliver actionable insights to our stakeholders.”
Manager, IT Strategic Services at Large US Healthcare System
Leading Provider of Laboratory Services and Research
A leading provider of laboratory services and research used Ardoq to regain control of their application landscape. Operating across 36 countries, the organization’s history of global acquisitions in mergers has resulted in silos between offices and locations. They needed to better manage their application portfolio to support rationalization discussions and find areas for improvement.
Using Ardoq’s best practice guides, the organization was able to quickly gain value and build a detailed understanding of their IT infrastructure and application landscape. Broadcasts, Ardoq’s automated messaging platform, let them build engagement with stakeholders across the business, providing easy access to information for accurate decision-making.
“I am impressed by how the organization has adopted Ardoq. The EA Team saw incredibly high usage of the Broadcasts feature. People normally not involved in IT are now contacting the team to find out how to use it in their everyday work.”
- Jad Issa, Customer Sucess Manager at Ardoq
Discover more about how this organization gained a complete landscape overview.
Medical Device Manufacturer
Experiencing high technical debt due to M&A growth and legacy systems, a medical device manufacturer in North America needed to manage their security architecture and comply with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) policies.
Using Ardoq’s Application Portfolio Management solution, they were able to quickly document their servers, applications, and processes. Our analytics and insights helped them implement policies and controls for their cybersecurity framework, allowing them to identify gaps and risks in their architecture. They matched their architecture to NIST policies in a matter of months, enabling thorough internal security audits and the identification and prioritization of risk mitigation strategies.
“The team was very dedicated; it only took them three months to document their architecture, enabling them to fully understand their risk and comply with NIST policies.”
Hana Wright, Customer Services Manager, Ardoq
Find out more about how this organization used Ardoq to build compliant security architecture.
Ardoq Drives Digital Transformation Everywhere
Ardoq has gained a significant reputation for driving digital transformation in healthcare by providing a single source of truth so the organization can ensure their data is up-to-date and accurate. This provides transparency about where data is going, building trust with patients and allowing them to provide better quality care and services.
No matter the industry, organizations across the world rely on Ardoq to drive their digital transformation initiatives and ensure they deliver business value. By being outcomes-focused and modeling what is needed to answer key business questions, Ardoq enables teams to focus on what could be more quickly. This improved transparency between business and IT lets them realize cost savings, improve operational efficiency, and make strategy a reality.
Contact us to find out more about how we can drive your organization forward and revamp your digital landscape.
