Leveraging a BRM to Move IT to a Strategic Partner in Healthcare
How can a BRM help drive value and additional return on investments in healthcare?
Healthcare organizations make large capital and operational outlays to acquire modern technologies so their institutions will be clinically effective. Many times, these expenditures are based on a need presented by a specific department or group within the hospital, and resources are allocated based on clinical or infrastructural prioritization.
However, just like healthcare organizations, many technologies present value beyond the initial project charter. Typically, healthcare organizations are ill-equipped to identify, design, and manage the additional flexibilities of a core system. They often rely on vendors to provide insight or best practices but can’t rely on the same vendors to assist with testing and managing the technology. The vendor profits by utilizing the customer as a beta site for a workflow that may or may not have been proven through measurement and evaluation.
Therefore, many healthcare organizations struggle to answer the question: How should the clinical enterprise utilize technology to its fullest capacity and value while simultaneously attempting to integrate multiple siloed systems?
In most hospitals, the tasks of evaluation, integration, and ongoing improvement are spread across multiple stakeholders in various departments and guided by a clinical system vendor or consultant. While a cross-functional team has great value and insight, the internal technology ownership is reduced to service-level management instead of value creation.
To compete in the new era of healthcare where technology enables efficiency and effectiveness (ultimately acting as an additional resource), hospitals will require a unique role to drive integration, value, and leverage the full scope of available functionality.
The Business Relationship Manager (BRM) has emerged in healthcare organizations as a technology sherpa—one who not only knows the functionality, features, and perceived system benefits, but also has clinical business acumen and lends tactical insight.
The BRM works to move all of IT to a strategic partner within the clinical administration suite. The BRM role is instrumental in positioning IT as a valued strategic partner, one who looks to both healthcare organization strategy as well as existing and newly available technology to enable the best outcome for the hospital.
Responsibilities include ensuring high hospital value, patient experience, and satisfaction of partner expectations. This is accomplished by working with hospital teams to ensure short- and long-term strategy and innovation, working with system architects to identify impactful technology trends, working with run teams and hospital staff to ensure that the value is realized from initiatives, and finally working with patients to bring the outside perspective into the organization.
Typically, a BRM is a company employee who has a broad understanding of the technical portfolio and its functional abilities (and limitations), as well as a background in business or healthcare management.
The BRM role is instrumental in positioning IT as a valued strategic partner, one who looks to both healthcare organization strategy as well as existing and newly available technology to enable the best outcome for the hospital.
The BRM’s fundamental purpose within healthcare can be summed up in two axioms:
“BRMs establish and maintain business relationships between business technology and the clinical partners they represent.”
“BRMs identify clinical partners’ needs and ensure business technology can meet them as requirements change over time.”
Why BRM in healthcare?
For years, this level of expertise has been outsourced to technology consultants or entrusted to clinical-system vendors. The belief held in many organizations is that the expertise of a vendor or consultant exceeds that of the hospital.
Admittedly, consultants are in a unique position to ask questions as they don’t “know” the facility, so they have fresh eyes. Vendors have no fear in challenging the status quo of a hospital and their questions are always developed from an outside perspective. However, they also must learn the culture, political environment, and current state while they perform work. Paid professional service hours are wasted educating vendors about processes and workflows the hospital staff already knows. Similarly, the primary motivation of a clinical system vendor or consultant is extending contracts and gaining future sales.
The motivation of BRMs is based solely on patient care and extending value to the hospital in the best way possible, meaning they will leverage the appropriate tools in the most effective way.
Conversely, the BRM can lobby internal IT resources to consume information about a product or integration, and because they already have an understanding of the current hospital or health system, they can guide clinical and technology experts to the solution delivery table. Furthermore, the motivation of BRMs is based solely on patient care and extending value to the hospital in the best way possible, meaning they will leverage the appropriate tools in the most effective way, no matter which vendor has an increased or decreased footprint.
Lastly, BRMs keep working to ensure that business value continues generating long after a project is completed, whereas consultants are long gone and have no vested interest in the end results.
BRM: A partner on the inside
In conclusion, the emergence of the Healthcare BRM role and BRM capability will help mold strategy and technology for the hospital. The BRM’s ability to partner with roles such as clinical informatics, biomedical engineering, and information technology bridges a critical gap to drive creativity, innovation, and healthcare organization results while ensuring and communicating technology value.
Ultimately, the Healthcare BRM will move all of IT to a strategic partner by driving value and additional return on investments for many technologies by increasing use rates and ensuring healthcare organization value results.
Kourtney Govro is the CEO and Founder of Sphere3®. After an experience in a hospital with her youngest son, she set out to find a way to make life better for patients and caregivers. Kourtney is an industry-leading expert in Nurse Call Design and Point of Care Analytics. Her expertise has been leveraged by a number of hospitals across the United States to improve workflow and deploy best practices. She is a speaker and author and has participated in published research notes in the Clinical Nursing Studies with UMKC.
Kirk Olinger is the Business Relationship Director for the Department of Nursing at Carilion Clinic. Over the last nine years, he has served on several clinical interdisciplinary boards and as president of the southwestern Virginia chapter of Project Managers Institute. He is Agile SCRUM and ITIL® Foundations-certified and is currently working on his Service Delivery Governance yellow belt.
