Many of my recent articles have been centered around the looming crisis in healthcare, and how to be resilient in the midst of current volatility.
Another important perspective is to see this volatility and the inevitable change as the opportunity it is.
For example: Gyasi Chisley, managing director and head of corporate healthcare at PNC Healthcare, shared this at the recent Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit: “There are a lot of things that came out of the pandemic that are still with us to this day, that are acting as really good agents for better care.”
He mentioned the rise of telehealth and advancements in community health, as examples of seizing opportunity within volatility and unexpected levels of change as we adapted to the pandemic.
He also shared the ways the industry fell short of true transformation: “We had an opportunity to really break down a broken system and build it back up and base it on personalization.” But we still make people, in his words, “come to a care delivery center like a hospital and receive care in an already crowded and broken system instead of trying to get more upstream” like offering more care in the home.
I see transformation as just a fancy word for opportunity management. As we adapt to new situations, we have a chance to create new opportunities – opportunities we either didn’t see before, or ones we weren’t yet ready to go after.
How do we begin to see change as an opportunity and not a threat?
In May 2023, top healthcare leaders gathered virtually for a two-day summit to address the challenge of personalization in a field that admittedly needs a lot of standardization. Thirty-two thought-provoking speakers participated in keynotes and panel discussions covering topics such as patient centricity, consumerism in healthcare, data analysis, digital transformation, inclusive patient care systems, and population health management.
This article is the second of five that will share highlights from that summit. In the first article, I addressed unleashing personalization in healthcare: beyond DNA, embracing individuality, and introduced one of the major barriers facing leaders and organizations trying to operationalize personalization: we start off dehumanized, talking about patients as disease categories instead of individuals who are likely facing the most difficult challenges of their lives.
In this article, I’ll summarize insights from sessions addressing transformation and consumerism in healthcare.
Transforming Challenges into Opportunities in Healthcare
Change is an opportunity for growth. In a session about transformation within healthcare, four leaders shared insights about the importance of examining an organization’s mission, vision, and role within the various communities the organization serves.
Lee Isley is president and CEO of NASH UNC Health Care. He highlighted the importance of embracing the unique strengths and differences that each team member brings to the table. By recognizing and celebrating these individual qualities, healthcare teams can foster a more collaborative and effective working environment, ultimately benefiting patient care. In his efforts to get back out and feel the culture, after so much pandemic-related fatigue among the entire staff, he makes a point to shadow the frontline staff every month.
He also emphasized an important reality: the skill of successfully leading a team through change is one that needs to be taught and nurtured. People need training.
“You have to coach your team,” said Isley. “You have to purposefully interact with your leaders and put in your coaching sessions with them about the strategy of personalization of change and leadership. Leadership is not easy. I think sometimes we underestimate how difficult leadership is.”
Gyasi Chisley, managing director and head of corporate healthcare at PNC Healthcare, said true transformation happens at the bedside – but that doesn’t necessarily mean a bedside within a facility created for sick people. The bedside can and should be wherever that person wants and needs to receive care.
Marty Sargeant is CEO of Keck Medical Center at USC. He talked about the reality that so many caregivers are still reckoning with the personal and professional impacts of the pandemic.
Michael Wolf, MD, MS, is assistant professor at Mayo Clinic. He mentioned another reality we all face: uncertainty causes anxiety. So we need to give people certainty whenever we possibly can. But we also need to be willing to be uncomfortable, and to give people opportunities to try things and fail.
Watch this short video of highlights from that session:
Consumerism in Healthcare: Operationalize Consumerism with Clinical and Non-Clinical Aspects in Mind
One of the biggest opportunities for positive change in healthcare is for organizations to embrace consumerism at the same level that non-healthcare industries do. People are used to the level of personalization they get from tech companies and online retailers – products and services targeted to and shaped for them as individuals. While personalized medicine obviously brings a level of individualized care when it comes to therapies and treatments, healthcare hasn’t been able to match that yet with regards to people’s individuality beyond their genetic profile.
In this session, three panelists explored the intersection of consumerism and personalized care, barriers to this level of personalization in healthcare, and strategies for operationalizing consumer-centric approaches to enhance patient experiences.
Christine Madigan is chief consumer officer at Tufts Medicine. She shared what healthcare needs to learn about personalization from other industries like e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sites.
Stacy Bratcher is vice president and general counsel at Cottage Health. She emphasized the importance of boards, senior leadership, and also working for policy change.
(Download the full report to get more on Bratcher’s thoughts on what policy changes we need and why.)
Katie Kaney, DrPH, MBA, FACHE, is a retired C-suite healthcare executive, an author, and founder of Whole Person Index. She acknowledged that the industry still relies on metrics that are largely aligned to a traditional healthcare system that takes care of sick people, rather than metrics that help them see people as their whole selves, rather than just as patients.
Watch this short video of highlights from their discussion:
Both of these sessions address a major barrier facing all of us when we’re trying to see change as opportunity: people tend to resist change. That’s why it’s hard to see it as opportunity unless we’re deliberately looking for it. That’s also why it can be hard for people in healthcare to learn from other industries about things like consumerism: that requires a willingness and openness to anticipate and prepare for the unexpected by seeking ideas and wisdom from unexpected places.
In the next article, we’ll hear directly from nurses and physicians who issue a clarion call to put patients at the center, and also from human resources leaders who share insights about leading workforce transformation during times of disruption.
Register here to watch the entire sessions on demand. Download an executive summary of the summit, to gain access to a roadmap for operationalizing personalization in healthcare.
Read the full article here
