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.

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What Healthcare Executives Can Learn from P&G

Procter & Gamble (P&G), the world’s largest consumer-products company that aggressively expanded for years, recently announced that it will sell more than half of its brands.

Are you asking what this has to do with healthcare? Well, a lot actually.

Just like many of today’s health systems, P&G is in a very competitive and changing market. While it was successful under its former strategy for many, many years, leadership realized that the best way to continue to lead the market was to become more nimble. As Lindsey Dunn quoted in a recent Becker’s Hospital Review blog post, the idea is to “create a faster growing, more profitable company that’s far simpler to operate.”

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Lessons Learned From Wal-Mart: What hospitals can learn about reinvention

A recent article in Becker’s Hospital Review began: When a successful innovator like Wal-Mart is urgently reinventing itself, America’s hospital executives should take note.

Indeed.

For years, Wal-Mart has been the envy of retailers, driven by a huge buyer base, new technology and a very tight supply chain. But things began to shift and the economy wasn’t the only reason that the retail giant had five straight quarters of negative U.S. sales and six quarters of declining store traffic. There were weaknesses in Wal-Mart’s basic business model, which had always worked, until they didn’t.

In This Era of Big Data, Avoid Being Data Rich and Information Poor

We live in the era of “big data.” It’s a term we come across on a nearly daily basis. The biggest problem with big data—pardon the play on words—is that data alone without insight can leave you information poor.

Recently, at Becker’s Hospital Review 5th Annual Meeting, one of the keynote speakers, Toby Cosgrove, MD, president and CEO of Cleveland Clinic, touched on how his organization was dealing with big data through its spin-off Explorys, which ties together disparate healthcare data from providers, payers, care settings and EMRs. The goal of Explorys is to help the Cleveland Clinic and other healthcare organizations manage and make sense of big data: because data is only data, unless you know how to utilize it to make improvements.

Fear Stymies Innovation…BUT it shouldn’t

Things move forward at a rapid pace because of innovation and we’ve been hearing for quite a while now about the need for greater innovation in healthcare. Innovation in healthcare has been challenging due to many factors, including the fast pace of change and a general fear of failure.

Last week in Becker’s Hospital Review I read a post discussing healthcare’s fear of failure and how that stymies innovation. The article’s author interviewed Louis Burns, CEO at Intel-GE Care Innovations, who discussed the importance of being a disrupter in your own industry, if change is indeed going to happen. To overcome this innovation stagnation in healthcare, Mr. Burns says that healthcare leaders need to take big risks and reimagine the healthcare delivery system.

What the Future Holds for Healthcare

This year, 2013, will be an incredibly busy year in healthcare. With just one more year before the largest parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) take effect, healthcare organizations are preparing for the biggest changes in healthcare in more than a generation.

Since the actual legislation is 900+ pages, I don’t know too many people who have read the entire thing. That is probably why there have been a plethora of summaries published since the act passed.

Connecting the Dots – Integrating Health Systems Post-Acquisition/Merger

Hospital and health system consolidations have been on the rise. The most recent statistics available indicated that there were 90 deals targeting 156 hospitals in 2011, according to “The Health Care Services Acquisition Report”, 18th Edition, by Irving Levin Associates. When the statistics for 2012 are finally tallied, an even higher number is expected.

This surge in consolidation is partially driven by provider responses to both the challenges and opportunities created by national and state healthcare reform. But mergers and consolidation also bring complex business considerations. If you add state and federal laws that can further complicate a transaction, healthcare leaders can find themselves facing even more potential obstacles.