IT Strategic Planning during COVID-19

Even before COVID, ProviNET was seeing a good deal of providers striving to put together a focused plan around technology, one that would fit around their overall strategic plan for the organization. Prior to 2020, there was a big push in the industry to revolutionize how providers saw technology, and ProviNET was fortunate to be the first-choice partner for a good deal of them with our IT Strategic Planning projects. However, as the team began one of these projects with a multi-site community just outside of Boston, we found ourselves in a unique spot as the country began to go on lockdown.

The provider had the ProviNET team onsite for the discovery portion of the project in early March of 2020. Within days of returning from being onsite, we began to see upcoming industry tradeshows get canceled, states going on lockdown, and providers especially were thrown into tumultuous waters. Just prior to this, the provider and the ProviNET team had a pretty good framework around a roadmap from getting to the organization’s current state of technology to their desired future state. But we quickly learned that COVID would put many of these recommendations and initiatives on their heads.

Instead of delivering a report that was representative of a point in time before the industry learned all the challenges that go with navigating a pandemic, both parties were able to connect on some virtual meetings to review initiatives and look at how to best reorganize the IT Strategic Plan with the new priorities that were arising. Additionally, we were able to review and recommend some of the new technologies that would help alleviate some of the current burdens, especially around patient/family engagement and telehealth.

After resynching on the IT Strategic Plan as a virtual project team, ProviNET was able to update the delivered report/plan and present this to the provider’s board to make recommendations on how to not only address some of their already known challenges and desires, but also on how to address new ones that were arising as the industry learned to deal with COVID.

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