Safe, Not Shiny: Sustaining Digital Health Innovation

Digital health innovation has the potential to address critical challenges in healthcare, including workforce shortages, clinician burnout, and siloed systems. However, sustaining these innovations remains a significant challenge, with many initiatives failing to deliver long-term value or, at worst, introducing patient safety risks. This paper examines sustainability in hospital-based digital health through three key enablers: workflow redesign, continuous training, and real-time evaluation. Using examples from one Canadian hospital setting, it highlights how redesigning workflows around digital capabilities can improve efficiency, patient experience, and data quality, while poorly optimized processes risk frustration and abandonment. The paper underscores the importance of sustainable training models-moving beyond one-time implementation sessions to continuous, role-specific, and engaging learning strategies that build digital literacy and resilience. Finally, it emphasizes the role of ongoing evaluation and monitoring, drawing on high-reliability organization principles to ensure technologies deliver intended benefits and mitigate risks over time. Collectively, these findings suggest that sustaining digital health is not merely a technical challenge but a socio-technical one, requiring alignment of people, processes, and technology. By embedding sustainability practices into hospital operations, healthcare organizations can unlock the long-term potential of digital tools to enhance patient outcomes, clinician experience, and system performance.