A Digital Transformation Framework (DTF) for the Healthcare System

The Italian Healthcare System is facing today a moment of great complexity due to the surrounding economic scenario and the constant condition of a market with scarce resources and constantly growing needs: Italy has one of the longest-lived populations in the world but a poor indicators of self-sufficiency in the last years of life. Digital transformation represents a possible lever for the improvement and sustainability of the Healthcare System, however a large number of digital transformation projects fail every year with a waste of resources which, especially when they are public, is not easy to justify. For these reasons, a framework is proposed here to support Digital Transformation in healthcare: starting from the analysis of the external environment and the health ecosystem, the framework helps to identify the scenarios within which healthcare companies will have to move in the coming years. Strategic options are identified in this phase and a novel type of assessment - based on the principle of continuous improvement - is described. Then, the framework provides a set of tools to manage processes and performances and supports the tools with a proposal of information libraries useful for support digital transformation projects. Finally, it is briefly illustrated how the use of knowledge graphs constitutes the basis for the implementation of artificial intelligence systems in this context.