Healthcare leadership in crisis: time for reinvention

Sharing our frustrations about our personal experiences with healthcare in the United States can sometimes feel like shouting into a void. Many of us believe that when it comes to our health and our lives, we are faceless cogs in a vast machine that moves us along standardized paths. Sure, we can get great treatment along the way (if we have enough money or good insurance), but we can also feel lumped in with the masses and not seen or heard on an individual level.

The encouraging news is that those who work in healthcare are feeling the same frustrations as the rest of us. They want change just as much as we do. They know the industry needs to evolve, but most don’t know how to make that happen in an industry with such entrenched systems.

I know this because I have spent a lot of time interacting directly with hundreds of people at every level of the industry, both clinical and administrative. In fact, I just finished hosting and facilitating an invigorating one Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit 2024. This two-day virtual summit featured a wide range of experts in the field, covering topics such as transforming organizational cultures, adopting a personalization mindset, healthcare leadership skills requirements, employer branding, operationalizing personalization, navigating healthcare operational unknowns, health disparities, and digital transformation. pros and cons, and much more.

This article is the first in a 14-part weekly series in which I will share insights from summits from a group of healthcare leaders covering all facets of healthcare organizations, from the boardroom and the C-suite to the patient’s bedside. We heard from presidents and CEOs; from managers specialized in strategy, human resources, communications and branding; and of doctors, nurses and teachers. Why such a wide range? Because everyone needs transformation in healthcare.

First, here’s a taste of what’s to come. These are just some of the themes that emerged during two days of insightful conversations between summit participants – themes that I will explore in more depth in this series:

• Healthcare is big business. As it operates today, our industry promotes the drug, not the drug. So, how do we change?
• While healthcare is about innovation and technology, it is essentially about people as individuals. How do we keep that central?
• Are you trying to build empathy within a culture of bullies? The importance of organizational culture in your pursuit of personalization.
• CEOs can learn a lot from nurses about leadership.
• People use many tools to capture information from the front line: but is that why you take action?
• We must learn to be open to opposing ideas and not run away from the discomfort they bring.
• How to ensure operational efficiency without sacrificing the personalized care that’s critical to great patient care and outcomes.

Is your organization ready for ‘The Individual Revolution’?

We are in an era when RBC Capital Markets “The individual revolution.” Power is shifting from traditional institutions to individuals. This shift is poised to redefine the global economy and disrupt existing centers of power. It’s no longer about companies defining individuals; it is about individuals shaping the process towards a shared mission.

The future of healthcare is shaping the future, but healthcare leadership isn’t trained to put personalization into practice. Leaders need entirely new skills to be effective in this individual revolution. Does your organization offer training for these new skills, or are you stuck with training that reinforces irrelevant and ineffective leadership methods?

Most are stuck.

That’s why this summit focused on how healthcare organizations can view both patients and employees as key consumers whose needs and expectations must be met for the organization to be successful. This includes improving patient care and also improving the employee experience.

Employees as consumers – Day 1 included six sessions to help people understand how they can work, lead and do business differently now that employees are consumers. Leaders must learn to know employees’ capabilities and enable them to use their unique skills, competencies and insights to innovate and mobilize change. This can guide healthcare providers’ transformation into a more responsive, effective, and sustainable system through the development of new models of care, improved patient and employee engagement, new supply chain strategies, a more inclusive and resilient work environment, and much more.

Patients as consumers – Day 2’s sessions focused on patients as consumers, to help people understand the symbiotic relationship between employees and patients and their impact on health outcomes. This requires doctors and healthcare providers to know patients as individuals and learn what is important to them. This also provides the opportunity to leverage data analytics and digital technologies to create personalized treatment plans that improve patient outcomes, increase patient satisfaction and reduce healthcare costs.

Healthcare organizations experience many threats: aging population who needs more care, but also experiences a shortage of it doctors And nurses to deliver that care, among many other challenges.

But it’s not the threats themselves that make healthcare leaders vulnerable. It is their inability to respond in real time when these threats arise.

We have reached a critical point in healthcare leadership that requires a reinvention of the way we work, lead and do business, given the scale, scope, speed and interconnectedness of healthcare challenges.

Leaders must stop governing by standards that do not take into account what is important to patients, employees and the communities they serve. In other words, personalization is driving the transformation of healthcare. Yet healthcare leaders are unprepared for this new reality.

I’ve learned a lot about operationalizing personalization over the past five and a half years of leading this work, but one thing stands out most. Standardization threatens, and standardization fights back hard.

What does that mean for us as leaders? It is our responsibility to coach leaders who are stuck in the constraints of old outdated norms and help them see personalization as a critical growth opportunity in healthcare.

Watch this short video for an introduction to the topics of this series.

In the coming weeks I will continue to pass on the experiences and insights from the summit. Next up: introducing the Day 1 topic: Employees as Consumers.