Applying Agile Principles in Healthcare

ASSIGNMENT 5: RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
Name:
Research Topic: Applying Agile Principles in the Healthcare Industry to improve the Quality of Care
PART 1: CITATIONS
Converso, G., Improta, G., Mignano, M., & Santillo, L. C. (2015, September). A simulation approach for agile
production logic implementation in a hospital emergency unit. In International Conference on
Intelligent Software Methodologies, Tools, and Techniques (pp. 623-634). Springer, Cham.
For a very long period, healthcare has been regarded as the most complex system in society, and healthcare has
continued to expand in scope as well as complexity, which means that the challenges to manage the system are
also increasing. The current healthcare delivery is described by the concepts that has interconnected medical
practitioners instead of individual clinicians in providing care to patients. In this essence, it means that the
success or failure of healthcare delivery is in the end determined the capability of those medical practitioners by
coordinating their practices. However, with the upsurge in healthcare complexity these previously dissimilar
care processes and healthcare providers becomes challenging to manage and align, leading to heightened risk to
patient and inefficient use of system resources. On the same note, the rise in competition and increase in public
health challenges with the decline in resources calls for a necessity to delivering healthcare services in a more
efficient manner (Converso, Improta, Mignano, & Santillo, 2015). In this sense, the ability to understand and
quickly get used to the ever-changing patient requirements as they pass through the systems of healthcare
practitioners is vital for the successful healthcare delivery system. In order to ensure that well-structured and
organized delivery of care should be synchronized to achieve the up and downs of demand is of great relevance
in offering high quality and affordable healthcare.
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Flood, D., Chary, A., Austad, K., Diaz, A. K., García, P., Martinez, B., & Rohloff, P. (2016). Insights into
global health practice from the agile software development movement. Global health action, 9(1),
29836.
Flood et al. (2016) argue that the aged solutions of lowering costs by reducing the workload of healthcare
providers are short-sighted at best. Moreover, other solutions borrowed from the manufacturing sector like lean
have not been fruitful to provide the anticipated improvements. In addition to that, healthcare has been reluctant
to embrace the service supply chain management practices, which have proved to be lucrative in other sectors.
At the same time, research and development in the supply chain principles utilized in healthcare environments
is still at its infancy, thus there are no clear operational-level procedures for healthcare directors yearning to
hone system-wide service delivery. In this sense, to address this gap, this paper will investigate the usage of a
relatively novel management paradigm in the healthcare industry. The management paradigm has been taken
from the custom manufacturing and service delivery “agile”, which is a collection of organization-wide
approaches that optimize the delivery of services in an unpredictable demand setting that has highly variable
client needs. Agile work to increase the responsiveness of the system to customers by enhancing the flexibility
and coordination of resources through the redesigning of organizational structures, logistic procedures,
management of decision heuristics and information systems (Flood et al., 2016).
McCaffery, F., Trektere, K., & Ozcan-Top, O. (2016, June). Agile–Is it Suitable for Medical Device Software
Development? In International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability
Determination (pp. 417-422). Springer, Cham.
Agile software development is a design approach that address adaptability and flexibility, close association
between developers and end users. Indeed, agile design ties various related software production strategies
(McCaffery, Trektere, & Ozcan-Top, 2016). In the recent past, agile model development has proved to be
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successful beyond the anticipated expectations. The emergence of agile software development originated from
the frustrations experienced by engineers with the traditional design approaches regarded as cumbersome,
bureaucratic and inflexibility. The traditional approaches were extensively variations on the waterfall model, in
which the project is developed using structured stages of product development, analysis, design, execution and
testing. However, waterfall model uses wide-ranging up-front strategies, deliver functional product at the end of
the project lifestyle and only involves end users response in the last stage of the project. As a result, waterfall
model is not suitable for addressing unpredictability and changes in the design due to its assumption that
problems are predictable and can only be resolved through planning.
Jamot, M., & Pettersson, M. (2016). Agile challenges within regulated healthcare environments.
To the contrary, agile model restrict the amount of upfront planning (Jamot & Pettersson, 2016). The objective
of agile model is to generate usable software early during the project life cycle. Therefore, this model then
makes incremental improvements by using numerous iterative testing cycles, redesign, and feedback. In this
sense, the contribution of the end user is given priority with focus placed on physical communication between
the software developer and the end users. Additionally, instead of trying to solve all problems and unforeseen
events that can arise in a complex system through advanced planning by embracing redesigning the
requirements. Consequently, to agile model fosters flexibility and adaptability approach by decentralizing the
style of management.
Agreement and Consensus
Provide two examples from your research where more than one author concurs or supports a certain claim
including appropriate APA in-text citations. Template suggestions:
Tolf, S., Nyström, M. E., Tishelman, C., Brommels, M., & Hansson, J. (2015). Agile, a guiding principle for
health care improvement?. International journal of health care quality assurance, 28(5), 468-493
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