Find Good Partners and Innovate if You Want to Stay on Top

Resting on your laurels isn’t the way to stay on top of your game, according to three leading healthcare CEOs who spoke at a recent Not-for-Profit Health Care Investor Conference. They’ve lead their organizations to success by keeping their eyes peeled for new and better ways to do things. This topic really appeals to me.

These CEOs seek ideas from both traditional competitors and from other industries. Rodney Hochman, M.D, CEO of Providence Health & Services advises healthcare leaders to “shamelessly steal” good ideas from other industries and Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health urges hospitals to share their own innovations with other businesses that might benefit.

in Blog / Future of Healthcare / Healthcare Innovation / Recipe for Success 0 comments

Never Under-Estimate the Value of Proactivity

I was very gratified to participate in the Becker’s Hospital Review 7^th Annual Meeting. I had the opportunity to introduce a keynote panel, whose topic was “Key Strategies and Trends,” and I also participated in a panel that explored “The Biggest Issues and Opportunities for Healthcare.”

I came away from the conference invigorated by the new ideas we all shared. When I got back to the office after the meeting, there was a letter from Scott Becker that reiterated what I would consider the one main point to highlight: That a real differentiator between surviving and success is proactivity.

in Becker's Hospital Review / Blog / Future of Healthcare / Healthcare Transformation 0 comments

No Small Thing – The Growth of the HealthCare System

Mergers and acquisitions are all over the healthcare news, and have been for a while now. As described in a recent article in Modern Healthcare, hospitals and other healthcare facilities are coming together to form “sometimes behemoth” systems with the ultimate goal to achieve scale to create operational efficiencies.

The article gives examples of failures and successes and highlights many of the challenges that come with rapid growth. Overall, Modern Healthcare concluded that “hospital system executives continue to pursue size and scale through mergers despite the evidence from some recent deals that problems undiscovered during due diligence—or from culture clashes—may make the marriage hard to consummate.”

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Can Healthcare Continue Its Outperformance Streak?

As a sector, healthcare has had a good run. According to S&P, “The health care sector has outperformed the broader market over each of the last five years.” That’s the good news.

Yet, despite a stable outlook, and even optimism that healthcare can continue to outperform the broader market in 2016, S&P notes some challenges.

The nonprofit sector’s stability is predicated on a boost from Medicaid expansion and the insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. But, there are negative pressures at nonprofits, including difficulty with poor IT installation, weaker patient volumes and the cost of absorbing physician practices. “The strongest hospitals and health systems are likely to just hold existing margin and reserve levels, while weaker providers will likely continue to see operating margin and cash flow erosion and eventually balance sheet pressure.”

in Blog / Future Growth / Healthcare Margins 0 comments

Health Transformation Alliance Looking to Disrupt Healthcare for Its Employees

When 20 of the United States’ largest companies (including American Express, Coca-Cola and Verizon) announced the formation of the Health Transformation Alliance that covers approximately four million people, they got everyone’s attention. In creating the Alliance, the companies have banded together to use their collective data and market power in a bid to hold down the cost of health-care benefits.

Alliance members intend to share information about employee health spending and outcomes, with a goal to use those findings to change how they contract for care. According to the Wall Street Journal, some members say they might even form a purchasing cooperative to negotiate for lower prices, or attempt to change their relationships with insurance administrators and drug-benefit managers.

in Blog / Changes in Healthcare / Future of Healthcare 1 comments

Air Traffic Control and Healthcare?

I recently read a MedCityNews post that used an air traffic control metaphor to describe what the future of healthcare could look like. The article compares the future of hospital operations with how air traffic control’s efficient and streamlined scheduling and operations transformed air travel.

The idea of pulling together activities that if treated individually and uncoordinated could be dangerous and/or cause service disruption resonates. We look at healthcare logistics in a similar manner. How can we take activities that used to be handled individually and develop new processes and infrastructure to turn those individual components into something better?

in Blog / Future of Healthcare / Integration / Physical Integration 0 comments

University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenge Turns 20

A few weeks ago, Crain’s Chicago Business published an article that focused on the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’ New Venture Challenge (NVC). The NVC was started 20 years ago. It is what started MedSpeed on the path it is on today and I was fortunate to be able to be a part of it.

I share this article because I appreciate the opportunity this program provided to me, and MedSpeed. I thank the NVC and Crain’s Chicago Business for highlighting the great things that this program is doing to encourage entrepreneurialism across the country.

in Blog / In the news 0 comments

Systemness: Integrating to deliver seamless, cost-effective, high quality care

Systemness is a term that is being used more and more frequently in healthcare. The word itself is a bit clumsy, but its meaning very much affects our industry.

A recent post from the Advisory Board Company describes it this way, “at its essence, systemness is about integrating all aspects of a health system’s governance, operations, and workflows—across all technologies, clinicians, and locations—to deliver seamless, cost-effective, high-quality care.”

The Advisory Board recently conducted a survey of over 150 health system executives, and the conclusion was that those leaders said, “in no uncertain terms that their organizational success depends on greater integration, and greater integration depends on their ability to do concrete things that reduce variation, improve coordination, and improve the flow of information.”

in Blog / Future Growth / Future of Healthcare / Increased Efficiencies / Integration 1 comments

Logistic Toxicity

Like the author of a post on Forbes titled “Logistic Toxicity, An Unmeasured Burden Of Healthcare,” I too had never heard of the term “logistic toxicity.” As described, it refers to the difficulty patients who are being treated for cancer encounter when trying to deal with their treatments and the morass of separate bills they receive from separate providers over a long period of time, not to mention coordinating frequent medical appointments, arranging for time off of work, for childcare or caregiving.

All of these logistical requirements can compound the physical and financial toll of this terrible disease and the term “logistic toxicity” really got me thinking about the level of logistic toxicity that exists in our healthcare systems themselves – in addition to the emotional challenges faced by patients and their loved ones.

in Blog / Mergers and Acquisitions 1 comments

Why Questioning the Status Quo Builds Better Leaders to “Think Different”

There’s a post that I read a while back on Inc. that keeps coming back to me. “Why Great Leaders Question the Status Quo: Being a thoughtful, creative leader means moving beyond the confines of tradition,” was written by Micah Solomon.

We all know of great thinkers and business leaders who question the status quo, and Solomon cites the late Steve Jobs of Apple as a prime example. The indelibly memorable “Think Different” advertising campaign that helped bring Apple back from the brink in 1997 completely highlighted the fact that Apple products and its leader were different from the rest of the world.

in Blog / Deliver Better Care / Future of Healthcare / Healthcare Innovation 1 comments