Terry Shaw shares with HealthLeaders his approach to navigating past the forces that resist transformation.
Innovating as a hospital or health system CEO can feel like a tall task thanks to all the mechanisms in place that maintain the status quo.
It’s easier to survive and keep moving forward than to innovate and walk a different path, but without the willingness to transform, organizations will find it harder to push the boundaries on operational and financial efficiencies while improving care for patients.
AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw recognizes the reasons for pushing back against change, whether it’s a ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality or an ‘it’s too hard’ argument, and believes that every CEO will face them at some point during their career.
“Every organization has inertia and the inertia of the organization happens every day, day in and day out, and you as the CEO have to be willing to push through that inertia in order to get the organization to understand that we need to do something different,” Shaw told HealthLeaders. “Innovation is doing something different. And most big organizations, small organizations, whatever they are, are not wired to do things different. They're wired to do things the way they did them yesterday.
“As the CEO, you have to be willing to talk through your own message and push through the inertia of the organization to get to where you can do that. Then you have to provide a safe place for the innovation to take place.”
Pictured: Terry Shaw, AdventHealth CEO.
One of the ways AdventHealth aims for innovation is through its AdventHealth Design Center, which allows the hospital operator to find solutions for its most pressing problems. As Shaw put it, the facility’s team is made up of people that know how to break systems down and put them back together.
He compared the process at the Design Center to deconstructing a Ferrari Formula One race car and rebuilding it to optimize its performance.
“My question to my team is always, ‘Okay, you think you're running a Ferrari, but what can you take apart and put back together and make that car or to make our organization function better than it ever has in the past,’” Shaw said.
“You have to have a mindset. You have to have a methodology. You have to have a safe place and you have to have the expectation that not everything's going to work and it's okay. You have to allow your team to fail fast and then recover from that failure.”
When COVID hit, Shaw took several of his team members out of the day-to-day fight and sat down to figure out the system’s “no-lose propositions” once the pandemic ended. The result was an understanding that the way AdventHealth interfaces with its communities as it relates to primary care needed an overhaul, with reinvention needed in the outpatient arena.
The system then designed its Primary Health division, running primary care in four different models: traditional primary care, Primary Care+, urgent care, and senior care.
Shaw highlighted that traditional primary care has been retooled with the addition of facilities and doctors, while Primary Care+ is built to provide comprehensive care with additional and convenient hours. On the urgent care side, the system currently has 55 locations and hoping to grow to 100, whereas AdventHealth Well 65+ for seniors is expected to reach 30 to 40 clinics in the next three to five years, according to Shaw.
“That's one big way that we're innovating around how to meet consumer needs in a marketplace that is very complicated for most people to access care,” he said.
Those types of significant changes take time and effort, but as Shaw advises, the wheels of innovation can only be put in motion when CEOs first commit to breaking the wheel.
Jay Asser is the CEO editor for HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Leaders shouldn’t let the standard, repetitive way of doing things stop them from innovating, says AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw.
The guiding hand of the Florida-based nonprofit believes in challenging yourself and your team to dream bigger, prioritizing the bigger picture over immediate comfort.
A major way AdventHealth has innovated has been with its primary care models, while its Design Center provides a space for new ideas to take shape.