The reality of what a community is and how it functions has gone through a tectonic shift in the past 30 years. In many ways our community landscape has been left unrecognisable by the impact of information technology. Our traditional locally oriented, largely socially driven interactions have been supplemented, and sometimes displaced, by compelling interactions which are increasingly international and often commercially influenced. While the physical structures of community, our homes, councils, schools, hospitals, clubs, churches, and shopping centres can still be found, how the community comes together within and around them has altered radically.
This is a journey being accelerated by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Strangely, this has in large part, not been a conscious journey by us. Information technology has presented us with uncommon benefits of convenience, understanding and discovery and we have all welcomed these outcomes. But now that these capabilities are in place and their sustainable business models understood, it is the right time to look at how communities can consciously use these technologies to support and further aid their social, psychological, and physical wellbeing objectives.
With our approaching exit from the acute stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a particularly important time for this focus on community wellbeing. While COVID-19 has wrought enormous stress on individuals, and governments have worked earnestly to address these challenges, the biggest impact is just beginning to strike our communities.
With decreasing emergency COVID-19 payments, combined with a contraction of employment, individuals, business owners, staff, ex-staff and their families are going to be under enormous personal stress. In this situation, the role of community in being able to support individuals is critical. Understanding how information technology can be best applied to strengthen community structures is a key capability that needs urgent attention.
For the past 15 years my focus, in both not for profit and commercial roles, has been in the application of information technology (IT) to improve healthcare. I have observed the transition of IT from the edge of care, where it was largely used for accounting and patient management purposes, to the current state, where it sits at the very heart of the most critical models of care.
I have observed the transition of IT from the edge of care, where it was largely used for accounting and patient management purposes, to the current state, where it sits at the very heart of the most critical models of care.
This took advantage of what has been the well-established role of information technology to improve operational processes. What I am beginning to see now is an analogous transition in supporting community wellbeing, where the more recently established capabilities of IT to support and extend social processes can be used to explicitly design environments that contribute to an individual’s or community’s wellbeing. These often sit alongside and within Australia’s significant investment in the digitisation of our healthcare systems.
This emerging approach weaves together the three major aspects of social, physical and psychological well-being. Our approach to models of care such as Enhanced Recovery After Surgery and other pre- and post-surgical support programs can serve as good examples of this emerging role of IT. In these programs the three domains work side by side to create environments that support their members in re-establishing a life that could be judged as being lived well.
To assist in this process of transformation we are working as part of RMIT’s Health Transformation Lab to bring together an international community of thought leaders to look at how to address these challenges. This community will be formed by a group of RMIT leaders, and will include care providers, patients, technology suppliers and academics to analyse the opportunity and outcomes.
It will be national in focus but international in reach. The aim of the group will be to curate a conversation around information technology in wellbeing and from this distil insights that can be used by policy makers and community leaders to generate stronger and more effective communities. Importantly, it will also lead to the opportunity for technology developers and vendors to deliver new solutions that more effectively address the community’s wellbeing needs. Keep an eye out on the Acumen Blog and the College of Business and Law Research social media pages for developments in this area.
Dr. Brendan Lovelock has joined RMIT as an Honorary Professor in the College of Business and Law, working closely with the Health Transformation Lab, focusing on the impact of Information Technology (IT) on the healthcare experience.
