Innovating beyond the fax machine. C’mon we can do this!
The pandemic forced healthcare organizations to redefine themselves; digital technology can lead that transformation to meet new strategic imperatives.
Digital Innovators are working to change how healthcare is delivered, because healthcare is ripe for disruption to reduce overall cost, create consumer-centric experiences, break down silos, improve identification verification and health equity, and so much more.
During the pandemic, organizations’ operations, clinical support staff and IT were stretched to their limits. Many in the industry sacrificially put the patient first, giving up their own self-governing mechanisms and pushing on hours to treat patients as best they could.
The pandemic forced organizations to realign strategies, including work from home strategies – only essential staff could come in, and there was a new push to monitor and manage patients outside the four walls of an organization. Facilities had to deal with staff shortages and hiring issues, and digital technology was being prioritized over normal maintenance and upgrade cadences, just to keep up with demand and the needs of the organization.
Forced to evolve
In modern organizations, we are incorporating telemedicine, remote monitoring, thermal scanners, touchless check-in, texting capabilities and more into use, hoping to keep patients and staff safe. These digital technologies, which were already being adopted incrementally, became a top priority for organizations and pushed healthcare fully into the digital era. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, there is a tremendous amount of technical debt.
As background, I spent 15 years in the provider industry – three years at a community hospital in Northern California and 12 years at a U.S. News Honor Roll hospital in the heart of the Texas Medical Center. Innovation and digital experience is a passion of mine, and I have been privileged to have worked alongside and mentored by some of the best in the industry. Many of us are trying to change the landscape of healthcare and believe technology can support this movement.
I believe that technology is key to supporting clinical and business operations. It’s crucial to make the lives easier for those treating patients and running healthcare organizations. Technologists, digital innovators and IT staff must offer expertise to drive efficiencies, usability, cost reduction, empowerment and frankly transformative scenarios to change the landscape of care in each of our organizations.
Recently, I became a consultant to help multiple healthcare organizations, and also to learn deeper insights about the industry, seeking more knowledge and experiences. The net of my learnings thus far is this – where do we start to make an impact? How can we best support workflow, patients and clinicians, and how can we drive revenue.
In a recent conversation with I had with a digital leader who moved into healthcare from another industry, I was asked to define healthcare innovation. Even as someone who promotes the use of innovation in healthcare, it was hard to answer, but that’s equally true for many healthcare organizations.
What typifies innovation in healthcare? Maybe it means highlighting successes of an organization that show a new way of leveraging existing technology, or maybe it’s a transporter identifying a new way of moving patients from point A to point B. Or it may be a clinician who developed a new device or a new form of treatment for disease. Is it simply optimizing, ensuring adoption and ensuring the evaluation of people, process and technology are wrapped up into one tangible road map, thus changing the status quo?
But my answer to this query was that innovation is simply enabling a new way of delivering healthcare. The industry needs to move away from using ingrained, decades-old technology like the fax machine and figure out how technology can enable an intuitive, self-controlled and ultimately an aligned experience – a digital continuum of successful interactions.
Anticipating the next pressure
While new technology may not revolutionize healthcare like Amazon did for shopping, Netflix did for movie watching or the smartphone did for communications, the industry must start somewhere and let ideas flow. Healthcare must level set and grow beyond a grassroots digital awakening of niche products attempting to coordinate with bigger solutions and move to more mainstream commonalities.
Disruption and change is very difficult, but it is happening across the healthcare continuum thanks to new entrants, startups, mergers, financial headwinds, payer mix, the pandemic and more. The catalysts for change are all around, but the industry often seems to be mired in analysis paralysis. It’s stuck on, where do we start to make impact? How can we best create and support new forms of experiences, workflows, patients needs, clinician burnout and shortages, and drive revenue against reduced reimbursement and cost reductions without impacting care? These can be overwhelming questions.
We must challenge the analysis paralysis and identify ways to go forward. Focusing on tangible wins, aligning with system goals, breaking down barriers for idea generation and creating momentum, to build the concept of a fly wheel. One of my mentors recently said that, “Once the flywheel gets started, through small incremental motions, the wheel churns faster and faster, to eventually spin on its own. Smart, thoughtful wins create continuous wins, which creates momentum.”
Can organizations align with this concept of small, incremental wins, highlighting KPIs, remaining disciplined to process, and continuously seeking inputs while creating the flywheel of innovation? Some certainly have created the Innovation process, but more need to start trying.
This culture and grassroots digital era is coming quickly, and we should use the metaphor of “Don’t be Blockbuster, be Netflix” to highlight the risk of not being prepared for the disruption that is coming.
In this industry, we prepare for surgeries; we prepare for procedures; we train for years to be experts in our field. Similarly, we must be ready to stay digitally focused so we can be competitive forces in our markets. That involves staying disciplined to our principles, creating tangible, prioritized efforts (that includes budgeting) and putting the consumer experience at the center of our decisions.
Josh Sol is managing director of FTI Consulting.