Sep 19, 2018
“The only thing that is constant is change.” Heraclitus
A confluence of disruptive forces is signaling a tectonic shift in the healthcare landscape– liquidity of data, expectations of a digital, tech-enabled consumer-grade experience, shift to risk-bearing models, ever-increasing cost pressures, and regulatory uncertainty.
Imagine all the simple and convenient aspects of our lives today– banking, shopping, traveling, paying bills or even having groceries delivered right to our homes. All of these tasks can be done with such ease, so why is healthcare still so complicated? Why is it that we have not yet adopted these technologies for the same ease-of-use as other industries? Why is it that healthcare Net Promoter Score (NPS) is significantly lower than other consumer-oriented industries?
In healthcare, we need to learn to cater to these new expectations, new buying behaviors, and innovative ways of managing health. Industry estimates suggest that the total healthcare data in the world is growing at 48 percent year over year, and by 2020, each of us will be generating approximately 1 giga-byte of healthcare data every day.
Imagine all the insights machine-learning can develop to take advantage of this data and all the new products and services that can be enabled. Digitalization of healthcare has already begun, and traditional business strategies are getting fundamentally reshaped. Organizations need to learn to have a lens in the future while improving on current capabilities and, more importantly, be able to deliver these at a warp-velocity, never seen before in healthcare.
At emids, we understand this complex time in healthcare because we see it from all sides. We work with providers, payers and health tech firms. We’ve witnessed the convergence of payers and providers firsthand and have a unique perspective of what the future may be. We understand the challenges our clients are up against in evolving to a consumer-first, digitally led approach.
As I reflect on recent conversations with customers, I see that those able to succeed in today’s changing landscape have taken time to develop a clear strategy and execution path across three critical levers, to deliver an enterprise-wide digital transformation: consumer engagement, business agility, and talent management.
CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT
Healthcare begins and ends with its customers. With digital transformation comes a new way to look at our consumers and the experience (through workers) we provide to them. As part of that, we need to redefine how we measure success and define our core metrics. Payers are a clear example of this. Medicare Advantage is the fastest-growing line of business. As a result, payers are rethinking what it means to serve this population segment and reimaging it as a consumer-experience healthcare product.
BUSINESS AGILITY
Business agility is another key component to digital transformation in healthcare, especially in these changing times with strong growth in M&A, and new-gen entrants. A successful organization will have to know when to bring in the right technology, combined with insights and agile-based execution excellence and be able to rapidly adapt to a new competitive landscape, customer needs and regulatory changes. Finally, digital transformation requires new ways of working and developing high-performance, collaborative styled, lean teams.
TALENT MANAGEMENT
An often-overlooked lever to pull in building your digital journey is having the right talent with the right operating model to execute at speed. Digital transformation is not easy; it takes energy and the ability to bring new thinking to the table. There will be naysayers, there will be use of AI and automation, and organizations need to develop and embrace these to drive new-age work culture, productivity and innovation. It’s why a lot of healthcare companies have started looking outside the industry for their leaders.
To help our clients understand where they stand against these pillars and build their own paths to digital transformation, emids has sponsored the Everest Group’s Digital Transformation Readiness survey. Everest Group has a proven methodology for measuring digital readiness, and we are bringing this to healthcare for the first time. This survey and the subsequent results will provide valuable insight into your organization’s level of readiness for digital transformation. It will identify your unique opportunities for improvement and give you the supporting data you need to set your organization’s strategy on the right path, beginning with the levers you need to pull to start your journey.
If these sound like insights that would be valuable for you, your team and your leadership, we invite you to take a few minutes to complete the survey. You’ll be glad you did.
Overseeing payer and digital solutions for emids, Dr. Praveen Soti is a physician thought leader and healthcare business and digital innovation executive with more than 18 years of health tech experience across private and public sectors in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Dr. Soti holds an MD and MBA and is an alum of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He served as a past board chair of the Microsoft Health Users Group. He has been a featured industry speaker at the World Congress, Harvard Patient Safety Colloquium and HIMSS-Microsoft HUG. Be sure to connect with Praveen on LinkedIn.