Built for security, reliability and flexibility

In a recent survey, only 7% of healthcare companies said they had 'gone digital', compared to 15% of companies in other industries. Whilst the industry as a whole lags behind, the great thing is, if you're reading this then its clear that digitisation and digital strategy are already on your agenda!

In many cases, the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a move to digital solutions. This is largely a result of increased remote working by non-clinical teams, and the need for efficiency gains across the board. We have heard from Life QI customers around the world about how they have adopted systems and changes to support new ways of working.

A report by advisory firm Gartner  makes a number of recommendations to organisations trying to adapt to the new approach to working. These include sourcing “digital collaboration tools to enable employees to work remotely, ensuring security controls are in place", as well as longer term objectives to develop a digital workplace strategy that includes collaboration applications, security controls, and network support.

What's clear is that identifying digital technology with the required functionality is only one piece of a puzzle. When the time comes to implement a new platform, there are 3 common questions in mind...

1. Security: How do we ensure our data and information are safe?
2. Reliability: How do we ensure systems are accessible at all times?
3. Flexibility: How can technology adapt to suit our individual needs?

Building a new digital workplace strategy that ticks all the boxes for security, reliability and flexibility can be challenging. Our intent with Life QI is to make those requirements a given.

We developed Life QI with large healthcare organisations in mind; their needs for security, reliability and flexibility are reflected in the product.

As Life QI continues to evolve and strives to improve further we have been reflecting on how the platform has been developed over the years to provide security, reliability and flexibility for running and tracking improvement work. Here are our insights …

Built with large healthcare organisations in mind

Life QI, as users know it today, is the product of a five-year journey of co-creation with healthcare organisations, including East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT). Not long after we launched, ELFT adopted Life QI and switched their 150-project portfolio onto Life QI bringing in 1,000 staff as regular users. 

ELFT pushed the limits of our original functionality, and so we invested in our roadmap to support their scale. We redeveloped parts of the platform so that ELFT had the agility and flexibility it needed to run its own project workflow and present all its improvement reporting in Life QI. That was just the start.

Since those early days, we've had the opportunity to work with hundreds of healthcare organisations, all across the globe - from healthcare organisations that are spreading QI at scale, and collaboratives who are coordinating contributions across 100's of unique sites. They each have their own unique objectives, but with one common goal - to accelerate population level improvements.

A 99.9% uptime commitment

Whether facing ordinary or extraordinary conditions, most organisations can’t afford the systems they rely on to go down. Whilst Life QI is not as business critical as clinical systems, people still rely on it every day to get their work done. Life QI is committed to 99.9% availability.

Of course, we always strive to do better, and our aggregated availability over the past twelve months is higher. Life QI’s systems are designed to automatically accommodate surges in traffic as well as handle software and hardware issues through use of availability zones to ensure redundancy.

With organisations around the world relying on Life QI to run and track improvement work, we’re committed to providing the reliability customers need and expect.

Enterprise-grade security developed to meet customer needs

Security is a fundamental part of our organisation and platform. We take it seriously and keeping customers’ data safe is a top priority. Life QI encrypts data at rest and in transit for all of our customers.

Life QI, together with our hosting partners, have best practice measures in place to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data at all times. We take this responsibility very seriously and are constantly working to ensure not just compliance with the law but that we support you in complying with any pertinent organisational information governance policies. As such we have robust controls in place to maintain security and data protection.

Keeping users engaged

If people don’t use a product, they don’t get value from it. We’re dedicated to continually improving the utility of Life QI platform and optimising the end-user experience. Life QI is used in a variety of ways, ranging from staff running local improvement projects, to improvement coaches and advisors facilitating large scale change, and organisational leaders reporting on improvement activity and success. Life QI is a platform for all.

To help improve our users experience we regularly encourage and gather feedback from our users around the world, which shapes the development and future direction of Life QI, making it a better platform for all.

Improvement run the way you want it

Consistency and structure are key in any process. However, not every improvement project is the same, and not every organisation runs their improvement work the same way. Thats why Life QI provides the flexibility to customise workflows to map to your project governance, approvals and reporting requirements.

In the world of improvement, we've seen a shift from highly structured top-down improvement initiatives, toward more organic, bottom-up improvement. Terms such as Rapid Improvement and Daily Improvement have become methods in their own right, complimenting more traditional techniques.

As a result, Life QI is adapting to allow enhanced flexibility to cater for variations in methods, workflows and governance. The objective being that you will design the types of improvement work (project, programmes, daily improvement, etc.) you want, structured how you want, containing the improvement tools you want.

Customer feedback tells us this is important no matter the size of the organisation or its improvement maturity – all customers are looking for technology to mould to the organisation’s way of working, not the other way around.

Improvement for the future

Over the past months and years, we’ve all been challenged to rethink how our teams work together. We’ve had to find new ways to maintain organisational agility, while making sure staff stay engaged. We've also seen an acceleration in the adoption of digital infrastructure to support these new ways of working.

But those adaptations alone simply aren’t enough. Leaders still need to meet high standards for reliability, security, flexibility and staff engagement. Our goal is to help healthcare organisations of all sizes fulfil these requirements for their improvement work so they can collaborate during periods of business as usual and exceptional times like today.