With the development of the vaccine for COVID-19, improvement of the global marketplace, and technology up-gradation, 2020 ended with optimism. Whether personal or professional, people want to build commitment in relationships. Businesses are attempting to innovate and drive a consensus between strategy and operations. And we see all of this come into play at the beginning of 2021 – or we’ve at least started the conversation. Let’s explore the healthcare industry’s growth in the pandemic, with Bill Liguori, a Founding Partner at Leadership Capital Group.
Healthcare Leadership 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0
A corporate system is composed of sub-systems that either function alone or in coordination amongst themselves to sustain the parent body. The two essential things that go into maintaining the individual bodies are leadership and communication. The healthcare industry consists of pharmacy, lab testing, discharge, ambulatory and acute care, to name a few. While these domains function independently, they still need to establish contact to contribute to an organization’s overall sustenance. Under the guidance of competent leadership, organizations build the right model to thrive and the healthcare industry is changing how they think about leadership.
Recruiting talent based on interdisciplinary knowledge and experience—what we call the 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 leadership. The 1.0 version of leadership has existed for around 7-10 years in an industry, say healthcare, where a physician with some sort of technical experience was hired for a role that required them to simply ‘deploy’ an EMR system that did not ensure the interlinking of different departments. The work was deployed, indeed, but only in isolation.
Version 2.0 of leadership takes a little further when you hire a person post-deployment of EMR to maximize efficiency from, say, 25% to 75% utilization.
Once that’s settled, the 3.0 version involves the working together of CMIO, Chief Health Informatics Officer (CHIO), and Chief Informatics Officer (CIO) to efficiently employ the power of information gathered from deployment and utilization. That is where we bring in predictive analytics. The leadership model, hence, becomes a productive whole.
Owing to the infrastructural, management, technological, and cultural rearrangement of a system, integrating several systems into a single one is a milestone that is quite difficult to achieve without extensive planning and careful execution. And once that’s settled, you need somebody with professional versatility and agility to manage an interdisciplinary system.
Very recently, LCG completed the search for a Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) for a $6 billion healthcare organization successfully. The person we recruited is a former engineer, present physician, the head of the pediatric department, and one of the nation’s leading experts in the use of Epic (a type of electronic medical record system). Her cross-department expertise will digitally transform the entire organization by straddling the medical and technological systems together.
Your data organization feeds your marketing organization.
The insights gathered from data can be productively processed to facilitate how you enhance your user experience. Version 1.0 is a one-dimensional approach based on the homogenization of user experience. Users can be of different types, like a medical professional and a paranoid mother. How does one bridge the gap between such differences? Version 3.0 is an innovative solution to user diversity where data is generated and tempered into actionable insights that guarantee results.
Bill Liguori’s search with a large health system gained insights from its EHR by asserting that if an individual faced a cardiac emergency and ended up at one of their hospitals, they would have a 68% higher chance of survival than any of the systems around the said system. Any person reading those statistics would have the system’s name in the back of their mind that would immediately surface in case of a medical emergency.
If somebody were to fall sick tomorrow, they wouldn’t be a customer but a patient. The work that goes into serving a patient is nurturing and friendly because it deals with human life. They don’t want to think of you as a customer because that would mean they’re extracting money from you, and the value exchange breaks once you pay them. Propping itself on the value of caring for its customers, the healthcare industry now expresses concern for its patients by using medical data like reminding them to take medication or precautions, which is continuity of care. Through preventive care, the healthcare industry ensures that a patient is treated, not just the ailment. This can be made possible with the innovative use of technology, thanks to the upside of COVID 19.
Technology can bring healthcare to people even when they’re not in the hospital by tending to sick patients and people at the risk of falling ill. The pandemic has had severe effects on mental health that technology can help to streamline if the values of medical care are broadened.
Your data is useless without insights.
It is okay to go off track when met with an unprecedented situation, but the real deal is how you cope with it. Despite an official’s 15 years of experience, gauging something like this is not possible, given the novelty of the recent trends developed over the last 36 months. So unless we have attended a highly informative conference on this, read about it in an excellent journal, or brought in McKinsey with a listicle on combat strategies, there’s no way for us to know what needs to be done.
From gathering data to inferring valuable information from it, technological up-grading the medical infrastructure can dramatically transform the face of healthcare services offered to people inside and outside medical organizations. Industries reimagining themselves as the future of the corporate world through innovation are the ones that lead by example.
