March 16, 2021
Ken’s Blog: Thriving in a Disruptive World
I am from a small town in Iowa. My mother was a nurse, giving me a bird’s eye view of healthcare as a profession. We had one physician (sometimes 2) in town. Mom was the head nurse and educator at our small local hospital which closed a number of years ago. Most of my relatives are pastors, farmers, or teachers and over these many years—I’m sure like you—I’ve been a healthcare guide for many family members.
As I look back at my 45 years in healthcare, I marvel at the many changes that have taken place. Indeed, in my role as CEO, I need to understand the past, provide direction for care today, and also create a vision for what our organization needs to be in the future. Borrowing from hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, we need to skate to where the puck is going to be.
That makes planning for the future exciting and unnerving. And that’s what I’ll write about periodically in these blogs.
How does CentraCare adapt and change to meet the needs of our patients, our communities, and our staff in a rapidly changing world?
A question that occupies a good part of my thinking is: How does CentraCare adapt and change to meet the needs of our patients, our communities, and our staff in a rapidly changing world? This is the work of strategic planning and it is vital. And complicated. And never done.
The first thread today in the fabric of strategic planning is technology. I don’t need to mention the many ways in which technology affects our lives — from Facebook, Amazon, shopping and banking apps to emails, texts and streaming. And in our daily work lives Epic, Oracle, Google and increasingly, AI.
But there is an interesting statistic from 2020 that lingers in my mind. Americans bought more “stuff” online than they bought by going into a store last year. That change disrupted the retail industry, taking down national and local giants like JCPenney, Kmart, Herberger’s and others. Thinking about healthcare generally and even my local hospital in Iowa that closed, if we don’t adapt and change – somebody else will.
Certainly, throughout the pandemic we have adapted quickly, created new models of care, and put technology to use in new ways. We know we can do it and we know this trend will continue. But even as we are all COVID fatigued, I will ask a tough question:
What happens when healthcare work is done differently, and we don’t adapt?
Let’s look at it from the perspectives of our key stakeholders.
As part of the CentraCare team, you could ask:
How does my role change (each and all of us)? Will we keep up? Will we have the resources, commitment, and flexibility to change?
A patient could ask:
How do I get care that is high quality, centered around my needs, and affordable? Whom do I trust?
Our communities could ask:
Will healthcare in our community survive? Will we continue to have access to care close to home, plus good jobs and economic vitality in our community?
These questions are unnerving enough, but let’s go a layer deeper. Our culture work helps us see that we all have blind spots and unconscious bias. Our personal and natural viewpoint related to health care is a familiar and comfortable one – we live it every day. What happens if something, someone, or some organization starts providing health care in a profoundly differently way? And THAT DIFFERENT WAY is very disruptive with serious consequences to our way of thinking and our organization. Think Apple, Amazon, or Google becoming significant healthcare delivery organizations. Oh, and by the way – they are!
Change is coming and a core CentraCare strategy—digital transformation—is based on thriving in a disruptive world. Is this transformation about specialty care? Yes. Primary care? Yes. Nursing? Yes. Physicians? Yes. Finances, quality, communication, billing? Yes. Our communities and patients? Yes. Hospitals and clinics? Yes.
You? Yes.
I encourage you to listen to the first episode of my podcast, Where Are We Going? In it, I talk with our Chief Information Officer, Amy Porwoll, and our Chief Medical Information Officer, Lynn McFarling, MD about the forces driving our transformation and what’s on the horizon. I also talk with new St. Cloud Hospital president and VP for Central Operations, Joy Plamann, about the patient journey within our digital transformation. And I’m joined by Dr. Jessie Roske, who shares her take on technology from a physician’s perspective.
As I wrap up this blog, I think of our purpose and our impact in people’s lives. Health really does mean everything and how healthcare is going to be delivered and provided in the next 20 years will surely be different than in the past. But we are still people serving people. And that is a marvelous calling.