In part two of a candid interview with The HCI Group’s Global Advisory Service’s Head, Tom Vasko, will uncover the firm’s enterprise view, global perspective, and approach on getting your provider organization to the front of the leader board on its journey of truly transforming next generational healthcare.
What are the areas you see as being quick wins and/or the order of precedence when advising and implementing consumerism in healthcare?
Global success of consumer ideology through digitalization ranges in nature. In today’s world, the positions of Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Transformational Officer (CTO) are equally as important as the CEO. Clients who have brought these positions to the decision table have been making steady strides and gains with high percentage of organizational and market ROI.
There was once a day when EHR implementations were viewed as IT driven projects. Cutting edge organizations understand it’s truly an organizational transformation and enterprise shift. However, directly addressing your question, an example of a quick and high yielding ROI change is personalization. For example, major retailers such as Amazon have developed “recommendation engines” to present additional items, a better fit of complementing products to their clients purchase. Surprising as it may seem, it accounts for 35% of their sales. In healthcare we can easily translate this into care plans and preventive care. We’ve deployed gamification into preventive care and response time; scheduling, patient education and execution of the care plan. We focus on staying connected to our patients within organizational care, post appointment or discharge. In order to achieve, here are a few tips on getting the foundation poured:
- Establish organizational cultural alignment across departments, practices, units and the entire enterprise
- Conduct consumer research both externally and internally
- Analyze technology capabilities, interoperability of disparate and consumer facing portals
- Create inclusion of all operating and supporting pillars of the enterprise, such as supply chain, research, billing, scheduling, nutrition, partnerships, affiliations and your community
- Optimise or analyse in-depth operating models and mechanisms before throwing in the towel
- Redesign or retune organizational governance across technology, operations, people and infrastructure
- Investigate and research your competitive landscape at a minuet level
How do you respond to healthcare executives when asked the return of their investment into such initiatives?
It is very common for healthcare leadership to demand a tangible ROI before looking to engage in any organizational initiative, whether that is in the form of cost savings, reimbursement/revenue gain or critical areas such as patient safety, decreased readmissions, and regulatory. There are areas, or certain initiatives difficult to measure quantitatively, but positive outcome is qualitatively attractive to our clients. Consumerism initiatives typically have a combination of qualitative and quantitative gains. Some organizations strongly believe in moving towards consumerism from a strategic perspective, and others are more skeptical. Defining and establishing benefits realization and metrics provides achievable gains. Therefore, we commence organizational assessments, viewing clients’ strategic roadmaps across the enterprise, IT, clinical, and business entities. It’s important to understand where the organization is navigating, collaboration levels and capturing the single organizational vision. Many organizations work in silos, however organizations who operate interactively, inclusive in nature and have well-defined role definition structures typically are successful in identifying and reaching ROI benchmarks. We identify how consumerism can accelerate, compliment, and at times lead major initiatives such as rebranding by deploying the change process. The process of current and future state analysis assists in setting our benchmarks and tactical strategy.
Locating or allocating funding is a common challenge. Therefore, it’s important to understand consumerism initiatives are not solely technology or quality improvement projects. Technology is a single mechanism - a contributor rather than a single sourced owner. For example, healthcare organizations spend millions in marketing each year; deployment of brochures, billboards, ads, television commercials etc. This type of spend can be reallocated to your consumer initiatives resulting in tangible and increased ROI. In addition, this is an effective way to establish collaboration by injecting financial commitment or “skin in the game” as we often state across all operating and supporting arms of the organisation. A common question to many CIOs, CEOs and CFOs; how often do you meet with the Head of Marketing and Communications?
About Tom Vasko, BSN
Tom is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University - School of Nursing. He is a longtime Organizational Transformation and Talent expert beginning his career in the U.S. Military in all aspects of change management through the complexities of People, Process, Infrastructure and Technology enablement. An alumnus of Deloitte Consulting and currently The HCI Group’s Global Head for Advisory Services. He has touched healthcare organizations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Asia, Middle East and Australia grasping a full suite of care delivery, technology and organizational models. Tom is known as a tactical innovator in healthcare IT, organizational strategy, and a published population health outcomes researcher.
Click Here for Part One of Consumerism of Care: Where to Begin?
