Partnerships are a crucial part of a successful team in any setting but especially in healthcare. In an episode of the DGTL Voices Podcast between The HCI Group’s Chief Digital Officer, Ed Marx, and Houston Methodist’s Josh Sol and Nick Desai, they took a deeper look at how these partnerships truly impact healthcare.There are a couple of questions that are important to consider, according to Josh and Nick, when it comes to approaching the ebbs and flows while still focusing on the consumer.
- What is most important to the end-user?
- What experience do you want them to value?
- How will you deliver it?
These three key items will allow you to remain competitive in the everchanging competitive healthcare landscape, while still being inventive to solving bigger mass problems according to Josh and Nick. They suggest that if you don’t get a direct answer, you should ‘go poke the bear’, break down those barriers, and use them to solve problems across the board. Josh and Nick agree that the secret is a great leadership team. Having one leg in operations and one leg in innovation is essential and proves fruitful when unison is created across the board.
Building Successful Partnerships
Ed: What is one key thing you would suggest to your peers in other organizations whether it be CIOs or CDOs to connect with their CMIO or physician leaders?
Josh: Trust. Establish trust and once you trust someone across the board, the sky is the limit. I reported to Nick for a while and we had to not only trust but also perform. Having those conversations was important as we were going through those ebbs and flows of our experiences together.
Nick: The ways we connected with doctors, nurses, and other caregivers in our health system were by defining what piques their interests. We figure out what their consumer’s references might be and what those pressures are. By doing this, we can help solve those problems collectively. I would ask any CIO, CDO, CMIO, or anyone in the C-Suite position to collectively bring your people together to understand what their needs are. Fostering that behavior and culture are important. I would ask others to think about culture and how you integrate that into your mantra.
Josh: We firmly believe in DIOP (Digital Innovation Obsessed People). About 25,000 employees that we have at Houston Methodist could come up with ideas to innovate. It does not always have to be technology. A big driving force is that everybody can innovate, you just need to show them the way.
Inspiring an Innovative Culture
Ed: So, what if you don’t have that culture? That is the world that many live in, so there might be amazing leaders like the two of you but are in a difficult place. What would you do if you were in an organization that wasn’t as culturally ready?
Nick: Part of this is about helping your organization understand what the net needs are and what we are trying to solve. We come from a traditional mode in the technology world which is one implementation after another, with widgets, platforms, solutions, etc. We need to take a pause and rethink what those top 4 or 5 areas are that need to be focused on. You must start somewhere, and you don’t have to have a lot of money. You can solve any problem, you just have to think creatively.
Josh: I think it is describing the why. Can you get people excited? To be an innovator, you must be able to tell a story and get people excited behind you to drive that momentum. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it’s okay to fail. You must allow for failure because failure is a great thing if you learn from it.
Nick: If people look at the definition of fail fast, it resonates. It is the principle of freely experimenting and learning while you are trying to reach your desired outcome. We’re assessing, innovating, adapting, and iterating. That is how you can move forward.
Josh: We can change the patient’s experience and the clinician’s experience. Through technology and process improvement, we can change the perception of how healthcare is delivered for the better.
Nick: At the end of the day, we are in this to make people’s lives better, and we want to push the envelope to find creative solutions and have fun doing it. It’ll never get boring if you are having fun doing it.
Ed: It is about a calm urgency. You both are very cool people, but you know you have been put here to do something special and you’re doing it.
To listen to the full episode and conversation between Ed, Nick, and Josh on the DGTL Voices Podcast, click here: DGTL Voices with Ed Marx Podcast - How Partnerships can Transform Healthcare (ft. Josh Sol and Nick Desai)