Readiness Assessment Maturity Model (RAMM)
Readiness Assessment Maturity Model (RAMM)
Author: Organizational Adoption and Change Management Working Group
Why did we build the RAMM?
For healthcare and clinical organizations to keep up with industry best practices, they must constantly evolve and adapt to ever-changing guidance and requirements, often necessitating changes affecting their IT, the people who use it, and the processes around its use. The ability to affect change makes this particularly difficult, and the ability for organizations to readily adopt and embrace these changes directly impacts their efficacy and ultimately their outcomes.
The Readiness Assessment and Maturity Model (RAMM) was created to help organizations determine how well-positioned they are to support these needs. This model focuses on what have been identified as key critical-path measures and indicators, allowing for an objective assessment of an organization and its ability to embrace change. More importantly, it allows for the identification of improvement opportunities to allow for more effective adoption and organizational change management by identifying specific skillsets, actions, or activities that can be undertaken to address identified concern areas.
What is the RAMM?
The Adoption Readiness Assessment and Maturity Model (RAMM) for sharable clinical pathways are intended to evaluate the maturity of an organization's capacity to adopt clinical guidelines, not the maturity of its clinical practice. Based upon the broadly accepted 5-level maturity model construct, the RAMM fosters and supports organizational transformation by improving readiness to adopt clinical pathways, proven workflows, and best practices and addressing human and technical considerations needed to achieve a Learning Health System. The tool recognizes a broad spectrum of implementation approaches and seeks to help the consuming organization relate their unique situation and address gaps they might have relative to their institutional goals.
The work has significantly drawn upon proven approaches from both within and beyond the Health and Healthcare vertical, where capability maturity models have been used to eliminate the barriers to improvement, to advance practice improvement, and to manage technology evolution and adoption through a disciplined, sustainable, evolutionary paths.
How do I use the RAMM?
The Readiness Assessment and Maturity Model (RAMM) is a foundational tool that can be leveraged to both assess the current capability state of an organization and to facilitate an evolution toward desired capabilities. Elaboration of how the RAMM can be applied to achieve these goals is coming soon in the Adoption Playbook (expected late 2021). Note that while the artifact is targeted toward clinically oriented organizations, it can be leveraged for other healthcare and non-clinical situations with little adaptation. Those involved in IT modernization efforts, in particular, should find this artifact useful.
