A Roadmap to the Future of Radiology Staff Resilience

Abstract

With the introduction of the Quadruple Aim at Philips, healthcare staff experience is recognized as an important health system performance indicator. Engaged healthcare employees are related to retention, patient-centered care, high patient safety and improved quality of care provided. However, burnout seems to be a common phenomenon among healthcare personnel. Especially employees from radiology departments are prone to developing burnout symptoms. This does not only have negative consequences for the individual’s well-being and the organizations’ performance, but also negatively affects the quality of patient care. As Millennials are the least engaged generation but will take up 75 per cent of the workforce in 2025, this thesis proposes solutions on how Philips might support Millennial healthcare employees within radiology departments to enhance engagement in 2030. This has been done by extensive research on how to create an employee experience that enhances engagement, how this looks like for Millennials at radiology in the future and exploring the opportunities for Philips to support this. Field research revealed that technologists mainly value involvement in the workflow, department and hospital. This can be enhanced by giving them more responsibility based on interests, experiences and knowledge that they build up during their job. This means that in the future, technologists will have tailored roles (e.g. management-expert, patient care-expert and technology-expert) and could take over tasks of radiologists and residents. Residents mainly value staff equality that creates an open and safe learning environment. This can be enhanced by structuring the supervision and assessment and by tailoring their learning pathway. This means that in the future, they will have personalized learning pathways which are tailored to their needs and learning preferences. Radiologists mainly value being result-driven to define diagnoses as soon as possible. This can be enhanced by technology support in the workflow and in the interpretation of scans and images. This means that in the future, technology will take over simple tasks and will enable a more efficient workflow for radiologists who will have more time to focus on complex cases and collaboration with other physicians. Based on these findings, five service propositions are designed on how Philips might support the Millennial employees at radiology in the future to enhance their engagement. Four service propositions are created during a creative workshop with Philips employees. As confidential information was used in this workshop, these four service propositions are considered confidential. One service proposition is created based on an individual brainstorm and insights from the project and is applicable to all roles within radiology: As the roles of radiology employees will change into becoming more visible and specialized based on preferences and technology support, it is necessary to have a clear overview of all employees to sustain the employee engagement within the employee, department and hospital workflow. This can be supported by “a personalized planning that helps radiology employees who want to define diagnoses as soon as possible, be involved in the workflow, department and hospital, and want to learn in an open and safe learning environment by allocating employees correctly based on their tailored tasks and managing the workflow efficiency.” All findings of this thesis are presented in the format of a roadmap where the design innovation elements are visualized: the changing role of radiology in the future, the employee values, the future scenarios and the service propositions. These propositions will serve as inspiration for projects or research initiatives for Philips to continue with. However, the next steps for Philips are to validate these service propositions with radiology employees to explore the desirability. Besides, these service propositions need to be validated based on feasibility and viability within Philips and should be benchmarked to other health technology companies as well as companies that provide educational services within healthcare.