Digital transformation in the Health Information Systems Service area of ​​the Barcelona Public Health Agency.

Challenge

The Barcelona Public Health Agency (ASPB) is the entity responsible for safeguarding the health of residents in Barcelona and its visitors. The ASPB management sought to improve its processes and information systems in order to meet its future business challenges.

To help them achieve this it was necessary:

• Understand your work procedures to be able to streamline, optimize and systematize them.
• Learn about the technology they used, with its dependencies and limitations, in order to simplify their interfaces, meet new needs, refine user interaction, etc.
• Propose solutions that improve the efficiency of the generation of their final products.

Project

Our proposal to address this challenge was to develop a digital transformation support plan that, based on an analysis of ASPB’s initial state (including people, processes, and information systems), would identify the necessary projects to resolve the issue.

This digital transformation plan consisted of three phases: an analysis of the initial situation, identification of improvement proposals, and the design of the digital transformation plan.

• In the initial analysis phase, through interviews with key members of the organization as identified by ASPB management, we conducted a review of the working processes, systems, and information flows used in their daily operations.
• In the improvement proposals phase, we identified the limitations encountered by employees when generating their deliverables and reports. We then transformed these limitations into improvement proposals (seeking some quick wins) by using a template that clearly identified which issues each proposal addressed. Finally, we individually assessed each improvement proposal based on the overall impact that its implementation would have on the entire area.
• In the digital transformation plan design phase, we conducted a thorough analysis of the highest-rated improvement proposals. For each of these proposals, we detailed its description, the initial motivation—including the needs and limitations it addressed—and its technological alternatives. Each alternative included an assessment of the economic effort and human resources required for its development.

Results

The final result was a digital transformation plan, presented as a three-year roadmap comprising 16 projects and their interdependencies. This digital transformation plan began its execution in the first quarter of 2017.