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  Today in health it, the story is the emergence of low code. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. And engaged. We have no sponsor for today. So if you're listening to this, you know the power of podcasting.

Our show, which started on January 4th, has already achieved 10,000 downloads, and that number is only going to grow. If you wanna get your message in front of a targeted healthcare audience, send an email. To partner at this week in health it.com. Alright, here's today's story. This is about low-code. If you're not familiar with low-code, we're gonna fill you in on it.

This is from cio.com. The title is The Four Essential Themes for Adopting Low-Code Software Development Culture. Healthcare has often been a victim of hyped up technology, so it's no surprise that CIOs are wary of new trends. Welcome to the Buzz surrounding low-code software. Low-code offers the potential to facilitate the development of solutions by using graphical user interface instead of the traditional approach of relying on hand-coded programming, thus requiring little to no coding to build applications and processes.

This more visual approach to software development is on the rise, particularly after the Gartner prediction. That low-code application development would represent about 65% of application development activity in February. Gartner forecast worldwide low-code development to grow 23% this year. And what's driving this RPA?

The success of RPA solutions relies on low-code or no-code applications and RPA is rising on CIO's radar because of the promise they offer as tools that can enable complete hyper automation and support digital transformation. This growing trend suggests CIOs must adopt a new philosophy for executing.

A low code culture in it, and they give four themes that are essential to executing this shift. Number one, keep it simple, stupid. The KISS principle undergirding the shift to low code development means that programming and automation should not be complex and not require intensive support from it to make the change.

While that may seem obvious from the underlying problem that low-code is attempting to solve, it's important not to complicate the new approach. Number two, all about speed by uncomplicating the development process and enabling more people to engage in it. The time to develop should be faster with low code.

There should also be a reduction in cost to develop solutions. They quote one of our guests on this week in health it, but that won't help. Without assistance in education and changing culture, CIOs will need to take the lead role in encouraging the automation mindset for the organization. Employees will need to be encouraged to explore avenues to automate by utilizing low-code technology tools.

Seattle Children's Hospitals, CIOs, Zafar, Shari said, we've embraced a low-code development as its intuitive, adaptive, iterative, and flexible, and has allowed us to develop patient-facing apps idea to app in days quickly with limited skill sets. It's empowered our teams to zoom in on the patient experience for digital transformation.

The third item crowdsource the IT department. CIOs must adopt a new inclusive mindset that envisions wider dispersal of IT involvement. It won't be easy. It's a profound shift to think of the future of running it in an organization where every employee has the basic skills to develop automation. Low code provides the opportunity to crowdsource solutions.

Within an organization. But to take full advantage of that philosophy, the mentality of the CIO must shift and they will need to find ways to promote citizen developers. I love that term. And the final item, IT department adjustments the future of IT and organizations needs reconsideration in a shift to low-code software development.

To make this shift, CIOs must emphasize implementing training their workforces on how to use the platform. And by extension, that means it must let go of control to facilitate the transition. So what are the next steps? Healthcare doesn't deal well with change, as you know, and CIOs are no exception to that rule.

When it comes to low-code transitions. CIOs must deal with their fears of giving up control and realize they cannot try to regulate and control access, especially to data. It can be freeing. Really, A CIO doesn't need to be the technical guru and instead can adopt the crowdsource mindset. Another guest of this week in Health it Baystate, chief Information Officer and Digital Officer, Joel Vanko.

Democratization of data and now democratization of coding through low code are key ingredients to creating a culture of learning and innovation focused on rapid solution delivery. It promotes reuse and mashups of app components that can accelerate development, especially single use or time limited solutions.

On the contrary, some CIOs view this as technical debt. Part two, it can be an extension of applications that all of a sudden are unsupported, but in production usage, CIO must decide on their next steps as low code platforms. Are not going away. Great article. What's my so what on this? RPA represents a significant opportunity to drive higher level of automation in healthcare.

That automation can take mundane tasks and increase the accuracy and efficiency of those processes by an order of magnitude while freeing up staff to focus on higher order tasks. It's a win-win really. Once you adopt RPA, the next step will be to open up the organization to citizen programmers. The word programmer in the traditional sense is probably not entirely accurate, but it will be process owners creating workflows for computers to carry out using tools that are not dissimilar to Microsoft Vizio.

This unlocks and democratizes the power of RPA. This will bring about new solutions faster and with more frequency. The CIO has to steward this process or risk quality and supportability. The platform should have the right frameworks and guardrails for security and error. Checking along the way, the citizen programmer, this isn't really new to us.

We have physician builder programs, which are similar in their concept. This has been wildly successful program for many health systems, and the low-code movement further moves the power to those who know the work the best. Now, if we only had . Great low-code tools for the EHR. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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