Leadership Insights: How to Turn Disruption Into Strategic Growth
- Category: News, Leadership
.jpg)
Leaders Share Best Practices: How to Turn Healthcare Disruption into Strategic Growth
The American Hospital Association recently identified the nation’s largest healthcare industry disruptors. They are the retail, payer and tech disruptors who are investing tens of billions of dollars in healthcare to build out their visions of consumer-driven access, care coordination and affordability in your own backyard.
Wait: Aren’t those disruptors mimicking the mission of nearly every hospital and health system in America? Exactly! That’s why marketplace disruption puts your position as the community’s trusted provider of healthcare - and the loyalty of patients and physicians - at greater risk than ever.
Improving Access to Consumer-Driven Care
Your promise of excellence in healthcare is worth nothing if the consumer experiences nothing but barriers and chokepoints to access that care.
This is your call to action to turn healthcare disruption from your competitors into an opportunity to lead healthy disruption and innovation within your own organization.
The good news is that leaders around the country are willing to internally lead disruption without destruction. They take on long-held norms and practices and share how to improve access to make your organizations less vulnerable to external marketplace disruption and financial decline.
Tammy Tiller-Hewitt, CEO of Tiller-Hewitt HealthCare Strategies, recently engaged three amazing leaders to share lessons learned and “crack the code” with proven strategies for turning healthcare disruption into an opportunity for strategic growth.
Key leadership practices include how to:
- Create a Singular Focus on the Consumer
- Lead by Example to Build Stakeholder Buy-in
- Fix Access Chokepoints Masquerading as Capacity Issues
- Commit to a Cadence of Clear Communication
- Offer the Path of Least Resistance
- Learn from Your Peers
Create a Singular Focus on the Consumer
Competitive disruptors have been rearranging the healthcare business for years by focusing on patients as their true customers: not the hospital, not the payers, not the physicians. Your patients are informed consumers with a fast-growing array of options to avoid rigid, confusing and frustrating experiences in favor of Hospitals. The healthcare industry demonstrated feats of problem-solving at lightning speed during the pandemic by creating a singular focus to defeat Covid.
You can use the same, focused approach to defeat the rigid, confusing and frustrating experiences that drive consumers and referring physicians toward your competition.
Lead by Example to Build Stakeholder Buy-in
Each of our featured leaders demonstrate their unwavering commitment to a singular focus on consumers as their number one customer by making it personal:
- Dr. Trawick checks his badge and bow-tie at the door to wait with patients at registration to listen and witness what works and what doesn’t.
- Mr. Hyde kick-offs off his leadership meetings with a live demonstration of the patient experience when attempting to access providers within their organization, and then with their competitors.
- Mr. Sawyer increases his team’s autonomy by removing the fear of failure and supporting well-vetted, consumer-driven solutions proposed by front-line teams.
Fix Access Chokepoints Masquerading as Capacity Issues
There’s no disputing that the labor shortage is real and will persist. But you can unlock latent capacity with a growth-readiness assessment, rapid cycle process improvement and strategic growth playbook to generate near-term results. At Lake Charles Memorial Health System, this approach:
- Reduced registration wait times by nearly 75% and created 30 additional cardiology procedure slots per week
- Created double-digit increases in outpatient procedures, CT scans and registrations
- Produced 636 direct hospital outpatient admissions and 458 additional imaging studies
- Generated $24.3 million in incremental net revenue
Commit to a Cadence of Clear Communication
Disruptive innovation can upend policies, norms and behaviors that serve the interests of internal stakeholders over the patient. However, each of the leaders shared techniques that reinforce the value of two-way communication, especially with the medical staff:
- Listen well, but communicate transparently and consistently about why changes that benefit patients must prevail, and support it with data.
- Build dyad teams to engage in regular rounding and discussion forums with clinical and operational teams.
- Deploy a boots-on-the ground physician liaison outreach team reporting directly to the C-Suite to serve as trusted advisors to providers and ensure that issues are heard and resolved.
Offer the Path of Least Resistance
Creating the path of least resistance for consumers can mean disruption to the status quo for other stakeholders. But disruptive innovation – focused on providing the experience patients deserve as everyone’s number one customer – is essential to your competitive advantage and sustainable, strategic growth.
Learn from Your Peers
Tiller-Hewitt’s leadership resources feature senior leaders who bring strategic growth solutions and case studies to life. They focus on practical ways to prioritize and execute initiatives proven to drive rapid impact strategic growth through intentional, transparent engagement with physicians, patients, communities, payers and even competitors.
Resources: