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. 2021 Nov 5;9(11):1508.
doi: 10.3390/healthcare9111508.

Change Management and Digital Innovations in Hospitals of Five European Countries

Petra Hospodková  1   2 , Jana Berežná  2 , Miroslav Barták  3 , Vladimír Rogalewicz  2 , Lucie Severová  1 , Roman Svoboda  1
Affiliations

Change Management and Digital Innovations in Hospitals of Five European Countries

Petra Hospodková et al. Healthcare (Basel). .

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to evaluate the quality of systemic change management (CHM) and readiness for change in five Central European countries. The secondary goal is to identify trends and upcoming changes in the field of digital innovations in healthcare. The results show that all compared countries (regardless of their historical context) deal with similar CHM challenges with a rather similar degree of success. A questionnaire distributed to hospitals clearly showed that there is still considerable room for improvement in terms of the use of specific CHM tools. A review focused on digital innovations based on the PRISMA statement showed that there are five main directions, namely, data collection and integration, telemedicine, artificial intelligence, electronic medical records, and M-Health. In the hospital environment, there are considerable reservations in applying change management principles, as well as the absence of a systemic approach. The main factors that must be monitored for a successful and sustainable CHM include a clearly defined and widely communicated vision, early engagement of all stakeholders, precisely set rules, adaptation to the local context and culture, provision of a technical base, and a step-by-step implementation with strong feedback.

Keywords: change management; digital innovations; healthcare.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Regions analyzed: numbers of hospitals and respondents participating in the research.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Use of particular CHM approaches in hospital management (pie chart), use of Kotter´s method by country (bar specification on the right-hand side).
Figure 3
Figure 3
The Top 10 most common changes taking place in hospitals.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Factors leading to change implementation.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Information provided about the change to the involved persons.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Success of change implementation by country (subjective assessment).
Figure 7
Figure 7
Most common approaches to change success assessment.
Figure 8
Figure 8
PRISMA scheme of publication selection.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Research directions in publications on digital innovations (IoT (internet of things), AI (artificial intelligence)).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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