How Do I: Transform Healthcare?

Healthcare transformation is all the rage—but how can healthcare executives actually get it done?

The litany of pain points within healthcare is long, from workforce shortages to soaring costs to ineffective outcomes. To address those issues, healthcare executives are looking at new technology like AI and virtual care.

Some are looking for small, incremental gains, while others say the entire care delivery system has to completely transform. But how can that be done?

Technology is a good place to start as it has the potential to improve healthcare—if executives know how to use it. And that comes with practice, says Arthur Gianelli, MA, MBA, MPH, FACHE, CIO at Mount Sinai Health System.

“You want people to try, to experiment, to potentially fail and to try again,” he said.

Another tactic? Call your baby ugly.

Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, FACP, thinks healthcare hasn’t done enough yet to transform—and it’ll take a lot more pain and suffering to move the industry in the right director.

Jain, president and CEO of the SCAN Group and Health Plan and a long-standing voice in the healthcare field, is critical of efforts by health systems and hospitals to enact change because, he says, they haven’t really changed anything yet.

“Why have we made changing healthcare harder than putting a man on the moon?” he asked.

In a colorful appearance by video at the HealthIMPACT Forum earlier this year, Jain said the industry has “normalized the abnormal” and put the wrong people in charge of care, creating a generation of people trained not to ask the tough questions—such as, why is healthcare having such a hard time defining value-based care?

Jain argued that healthcare leaders have to get serious about change, to the point of shutting down programs that aren’t working and enduring declining revenues and job losses. But healthcare, he said, has a very hard time shutting down anything.

“You can’t change without changing,” he said. “It starts by calling our baby ugly, and that’s really, really hard to do because it’s our baby.”

Jain likens AI to the printing press in its potential to transform an industry but says healthcare leaders have to ask the tough questions now, cutting programs and positions that aren’t working.

To Gianelli, that means moving away from the same old conversations about financial benefits and looking more closely at what healthcare should be doing: Making people healthier. AI could do that, he says, and it could also “change the types of people that we actually need in the organization.”

This article is part of HealthLeaders’ How Do I? series. Read the entire article by Eric Wicklund here.