Much of what I have been reading lately in healthcare journals and blogs involves how health organizations are reacting to news or events.
Physicians with continuously eroding revenues partnering together to ensure more of their share of the remaining pie. Hospitals losing procedural business to physician-owned outpatient facilities looking for ways to hire physicians as employees, ensuring the business they have has less chance of migrating. Health insurance companies, feeling the mounting pressure from large employer demands, reacting with even higher rates of claim denials, even when previously approved. Employers, reacting to skyrocketing group health insurance costs, shouldering employees with an increasing share of the individual costs. And families reacting to huge inflation in care costs with large deflation of actual services.
I am always incredibly puzzled by the reactions, both by the kind of reaction and the size of it. Why do healthcare companies operate as though their work is performed in a stable, consistent environment? Why do they wait for something to happen and then react to it, sometimes with vehement and misplaced emotion? Why aren't they proactively planning their strategies around likely scenarios?
And much more critical: Why aren't they looking for the opportunities enmeshed in the crisis of constant change?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a series of pieces on Who Is the Customer? in healthcare. This generated a great deal of discussion in several of the circles in which I learn. I began to ask professionals if they believed healthcare offered the big opportunities it was once known for, and the responses came back almost in chorus: Not Like It Used To!!
The fallacy of this is startling. The Japanese word for "crisis" is the same word for "opportunity". Throughout the last 500 years, the biggest fortunes and the greatest improvements to the quality of life and health to mankind have come from innovations during times of crisis. And the champions who made these advancements looked at the crisis du jour as simply: Change.
Lately, I have been challenging our clients and colleagues to adapt a very different posture when looking at healthcare change and their place within. I've challenged them to ask: What opportunities to do something very different and meaningful for my customers can come as a response to coming change? What opportunities to "own" healthcare's real value are discovered as a result of a major, strategic disruptor? What opportunities to reinvent your position to market leadership and sustained competitive advantage are ripe for the picking, if only we connect 1000 times better with our customers than we've done so before.
I'm in the Discovery business -- learning intimate details about customers interactions and level of loyalty with their service providers, but I'm also in the Healthcare Transformation business. I believe in opportunity, and I believe that the people who control health systems and then react to changes are in a unique but squandered position to change they way people are served throughout their lives. When we look back at this moment in time from 10 years ahead, we'll see that a few understood this opportunity and seized it, and they totally changed the way people use, access and interact with their health.
How will you look at the field of opportunities and make a change for your organization? How can the barriers in place be removed in favor of a great new way to serve people and keep them loyal to your organization for life? How will you invite innovation into your way of considering healthcare changes, so to help your organization rise to the lead position in the market?
You have the power, and you will make it happen.
-------Michael
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