638: Innovating for the Future: Organizational Challenges of Healthcare’s Digital Transformation (19605)

New technologies are an occasion for organizational restructuring (Barley, 1986). Accordingly, there arguably is no domain that is open for more restructuring than the healthcare domain. Healthcare is currently undergoing a period of rapid and profound technological change, spurred by advances in and the convergence of fields such as precision medicine, robotics, and artificial intelligence. These changes herald steep improvements in how we manage health. Telemedicine allows us to provide previously cut-off patients access to healthcare in remote and under-resourced healthcare settings, artificial intelligence has the potential of taking over critical tasks from highly skilled professionals such as radiologists, and is changing clinical decision making, precision medicine offers the opportunity to personalize prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and advances in genomic medicine have opened up new avenues for treating patients in revolutionary new ways based on the variability of diseases. Yet, the potential of these new technologies mostly remains untapped in our current health systems as the organizational complexities of implementing these technologies often prove too difficult to resolve. These complexities were for example on full display as part of the systemic failures of even the richest health systems to effectively manage COVID-19 outbreaks during the pandemic, and by the many high-profile failures to integrate new electronic health record systems in clinical care such as the US$ 16 billion electronic health records update that the US Veteran’s Affairs health system abandoned in 2023. This panel brings together an interdisciplinary group of organizational scholars to shed their light on the challenges posed by the raft of new technologies – all of which digital – engulfing the healthcare domain. Specifically, this panel will examine how the successful implementation of these new technologies is generally interlinked with a need to refashion existing (1) organizational structures, (2) patterns of interaction, and (3) institutional roles that define the healthcare domain. While this panel engages with broader debates in the organizational literature on digital transformations as organizational transformations (e.g. Anthony, Bechky & Fayard, 2023; Lebovitz, Lifshitz-Assaf & Levina, 2022; Waardenburg, Huysman & Sergeeva, 2021), the clear focus is on the unique organizational complexities that characterize healthcare settings.