“Sustainable Digital Governance in Healthcare: Addressing Challenges to Maximize Innovation in Regional Hospitals"

Abstract:

Digital governance in healthcare entails the strategic oversight of digital technologies, ensuring alignment with healthcare objectives, regulatory compliance, and enhancement of patient care. Central to digital governance is the ethical imperative to uphold patient autonomy, promote justice, and maintain transparency. This is increasingly vital as the improvement of healthcare services can be leveraged with digital innovation. This lecture provides an overview of digital governance in healthcare, and outlines some challenges that must be considered when balancing the imperative to innovate, including data privacy, Indigenous data sovereignty, and trust and risk perceptions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This lecture will also cover the case of Northwestern Ontario Hospitals (NOH), a group of hospitals centered in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. They are currently undergoing a regional expansion of their Electronic Health Record (EHR), and a Digital Governance Structure was put into place to facilitate interorganizational decision making to deal with these challenges. Considering these issues, how sustainable is the digital governance structure of NOH, and what concrete and innovative recommendations can improve its digital governance, given the issues that it faces?

Bio:

Michael S. Dohan (PhD, MSc, HBComm, DiplB) is an Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Information Systems at the Faculty of Business Administration and Director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. He earned his PhD in Business Administration from DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, with a research focus on digital health. The title of his dissertation is “The Importance of Healthcare Informatics Competencies (HICs) For Service Innovation in Paramedicine: A Mixed-Methods Investigation”. His research has been published in Communications of the Association of Information Systems, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Healthcare Management Review, Healthcare Policy and Technology, and conferences such as America’s Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Hawai’ian International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), and others. Outside of academia, he has 10 years of industry experience as a programmer/analyst and IT consultant in Canada and Ireland.