Digital Leadership and Strategies to Transform Post-Surgical Transition of Care (TOC)

Abstract

Abstract

Healthcare organizations are encountering increasing complexity as they extend care beyond clinical settings into the broader patient ecosystem to improve outcomes and reduce costs. This complexity arises from the growing involvement of external partners and patients in co-producing both treatment practices and services as a part of their community engagement models. Complexity theory suggests that organizations must engage in administrative, enabling, and adaptive leadership processes. Enabling leadership explores and evaluates new services to meet the strategic vision and goals set by administrative leadership, such as improving patient outcomes and reducing the cost of care delivery. Adaptive leadership assesses these ideas for their viability in supporting the vision. Digital leadership represents an enabling leadership process that leverages technologies in the design of new services being explored. This prompts the central question: How can digital leadership be operationalized to support a community model?

This paper proposes a methodology encompassing four core steps: need identification, idea generation, exploration, and evaluation. The need identification phase involves mapping the service pathways currently used to address organizational goals and assessing gaps in these services. The idea generation phase draws on established innovation methods to develop new services for exploration. The subsequent steps—exploration and evaluation—are intended to assess the effectiveness of proposed services prior to their adoption by the organization. We will use inter-organizational dynamic model research to define the roles of providers, patients, and partners in shaping service paths, as well as prior research on innovation methods to generate solution ideas for addressing service gaps. We will illustrate the first two phases of this digital leadership methodology, demonstrating how it can be used to improve transition of care (TOC) following the discharge of surgical patients through a case study of a healthcare organization. The paper will conclude with a discussion of future research directions, including an evaluation of the service ideas proposed for the case discussed.

Key words: Inter-organizational community model, patient readmission, Transition of care, Innovation, Relationship governance, Resource orchestration, Case study