Take a Moonshot and Make a Giant Leap for Healthcare

This past July, The Health Management Academy gathered many leaders from within and outside of our industry for a summit that probed “CEO Leadership in an Age of Disruption.” There were many heavy-hitters in attendance, but in particular, I thought the discussion of Google’s Eric “Astro” Teller was particularly interesting.

Teller’s official title at Google X, the company’s research and development lab, is “Captain of Moonshots.” And if that’s not a disruptive title, I’m not sure what is. (It should be noted that renowned author Thomas Friedman discussed Teller in his opening remarks entitled “Thriving in an Age of Accelerations.” Teller himself was not present.)

in Blog / Disruption / Future of Healthcare 0 comments

Elements of Successful Outsourcing

Has it ever occurred to you to equate outsourcing with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It had not occurred to me either until I read an excellent post by Kate Vitasek, architect of the “Vested Business Model” who is also a professor at the University of Tennessee.

Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, defined the hierarchy of needs something like this: human beings are motivated by unsatisfied needs and certain lower needs must be satisfied before higher needs can be addressed. The hierarchy of needs pyramid starts with physiological needs at the base, then moves up to safety needs, social needs and esteem needs. The fulfillment of those needs is what leads to self-actualization.

Is your outsourcing relationship self-actualized?

In a nutshell, here is Vitasek’s comparison to outsourcing.

in Blog / Future of Healthcare / Outsourcing / Vested Outsourcing 2 comments

Hats off to our MedSpeed summer interns!

By Angie Gray, Vice President of Human Resources, MedSpeed

This week, six college students from across the country successfully completed MedSpeed operations and marketing internships at six of our different offices. Each year, the MedSpeed team looks forward to hosting these individuals, who always infuse our business with fresh perspective and innovative ideas. We would like to thank them for their hard work, commitment and enthusiasm.

As the interns wrapped up this week, we were pleased to welcome them to our home office to report on their experiences. They brought several ideas forward related to efficiency, process refinement and strategy. They also shared how their assigned tasks helped prepare them for their future careers.

in Blog 0 comments

Supply Chain Is All About Value

A blog post by the chairperson of the American Council of Sourcing and Procurement Executive poses a very interesting idea. That the job of the chief procurement officer has changed so much over the past few years that the title is no longer accurate. Most who conduct this job today do far more than source, buy and manage the supply chain.

As a company that works closely with those involved in supply chain, we know firsthand that supply chain touches every area within an organization. As a result, supply chain has the direct ability to create value across all areas of an organization.

in Blog / Supply Chain / Value 0 comments

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

According to the 2017 HealthLeaders Media Cost and Revenue Strategies Survey, healthcare executives who embrace determining the true cost of providing care at their organizations find themselves in a better position to offer transparency, which they see as a competitive differentiator.

One of the largest obstacles to revenue growth is our industry’s inability to determine the true cost of care delivery. The HealthLeaders’ survey bears this out. Respondents say that the biggest barrier to achieving sustainable cost reductions is the lack of data on the true cost of care (58%).

This lack of data/insight is something we’ve seen in our own work with organizations on the intra-company logistics front. We get it. The healthcare finance system is not designed to calculate transportation costs. The result: most organizations don’t know the true cost of transporting items throughout their system. Lacking that measurement means they have no way of knowing how to manage those costs or improve their operations.

in Blog / Cost Management / Hidden Waste 0 comments

Honored by EY as Entrepreneur Of The Year®, Midwest

On June 21, 2017, I was honored to accept EY’s prestigious Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2017 Midwest Award on behalf of all MedSpeeders.

The competition has been around for 31 years and is one of the most significant, if not the most significant, competitions recognizing such areas as innovation, initiative, growth and culture. Some truly incredible companies have received the same award we did last night.

in Blog / In the news 1 comments

The Importance of the Supply Chain and Healthcare’s Quadruple Aim

As healthcare continues to march towards value-based care the importance of an efficient healthcare supply chain grows. Not too long ago, the supply chain was all too-often viewed as a transactional process. We at MedSpeed know that the transactional view of the supply was shortsighted. A recent article in Becker’s Hospital Review confirms that the supply chain “is [now] considered a core competency for hospitals to reduce waste and lower costs, while supporting patient care initiatives.”

Supply chain and supply chain leaders are now included in C-suite discussions, and for good reason: Reducing inefficiencies in the supply chain helps organizations focus more on patient care.

According to Peter Mallow, PhD, program director of health economics, market access and reimbursement for Cardinal Health, supply chain leaders have evolved into enablers with a greater focus on patient experience because instead of simply moving things from A to B, supply chain is looking to ensure that they’re improving—not adding complexity to—the job of clinicians.

in Blog / Deliver Better Care / Quadruple Aim / Supply Chain Management / Triple Aim 0 comments

Healthcare Leaders Look to Manage Costs and Reduce Variation

Our healthcare industry finds itself in a period of uncertainty. No one knows what the future of payment/insurance reform will be. Regardless of where things land, a new survey of health system leaders conducted by Premier Inc. found that managing costs is their top priority.

Coverage of the survey in Healthcare Finance noted that C-suite executives are focused on improving productivity and reducing supply chain inefficiencies, pharmaceutical costs and clinical variation.

Another priority in the C-suite, according to the survey, is moving from meaningful use to meaningful insight. Systems are looking beyond recording data and are increasingly integrating and combining data to streamline analytics on supply chain, financial and clinical care.

in Big Data / Blog / Healthcare Reform / Systemness 0 comments

How to Move from a Holding Company to an Operating Company

It’s the key for health systems to achieve economies of scale

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of participating in a panel at Becker’s Hospital Review 8th Annual Meeting with Khosrow Shotorbani, president and CEO of TriCore Reference Laboratories, Bill Santulli, EVP and COO of Advocate Health Care and Mark Dixon, president of The Mark Dixon Group and former regional president of Fairview Health Service. We spoke about the nationwide trend of health systems moving from a holding company model to an operating company model and all agreed that this trend will continue to accelerate.

in Blog / Economies of Scale / Future of Healthcare / Systemness 0 comments

Millennials and the Multi-Generational Workforce

Millennials (those born between the early 80s and early 2000s) are now the largest living generation in the United States. According to Pew Research, in 2016 there were 75.4 million Millennials in the U.S.

And that means Millennials are becoming a larger and larger percentage of our workforce.

A recent post in Becker’s Hospital Review, discussed ways of engaging Millennials as part of a multi-generational workforce. The author, Michael Dowling points out that “it’s critical that we work extra hard to understand how the younger generations think, what motivates them, how they behave and how they prefer to communicate.” He goes on to warn that leaders who are not mindful of the work styles and ways to engage Millennials will have difficulty retaining this huge segment of the workforce.

in Blog / Recipe for Success 0 comments