Welcome to the Healthcare Cure podcast. A podcast dedicated to the bold mission of The Healthcare Cure. Now, here’s your host, healthcare futurist, best selling author and adjunct professor Nick Webb.
Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of The Healthcare Cure. Now today I don’t have a guest because I want to share with you some ideas that hopefully you can apply to your organization if you’re in healthcare, if you’re just a patient and listening to this podcast then keep an eye out on the trends that I’m talking about, because you could benefit from this. So no matter who you are, as my listener today, keep in mind that this is relevant, rather you’re a patient or you’re an executive, or caregiver in the healthcare ecosystem. Now, first of all, I’d like to point out by stating something that is very obvious, but not very well deployed. That is when we hear the terms the post COVID economy
And we hear terms like the new normal, they are wrong. First of all, there’s nothing normal about what is now new. Secondly, this isn’t a post COVID economy. This is a completely new economy. Post COVID suggests that we’re going to ultimately move back to where we were before. So I’ve coined the term the C 19 economy because it suggests that there are known anatomical features of this new economy and if we can understand them, we can apply them in a very practical way to impact the way in which we serve patients, and the way in which we run superstar organizations. Now, here are some things that I’d like you to consider. You know, I’ve spent the last 18 months researching my book, the Healthcare Mandate that will be available in fall of 2020. And I’ve just launched last year, my book the Innovation Mandate. So I’ve looked at the world from the impending massive changes that are happening on the innovation frontier. And then I’ve applied those to the changes that are happening within healthcare. So total of about four years of research, and here’s what I discovered is that the rate of change and the size of change is phenomenal. In other words, for a very, very long time in healthcare, we got to enjoy predictable,
comfortable,
and understandable change. So it allowed us to take time to be able to make decisions. And in fact, it created something that I like to call latency legacy. Latency legacy. In other words, we’ve created the institutionalization of being late. Hard to believe, but it’s true. In other words, most organizations and healthcare run reactive organizations. Rather than proactive, innovative organizations. In a time of massive change, that’s a super bad idea. We have to build innovation in our organization, as an organizational mandate. Now, in my consulting life, I’ve had the great privilege of working with drug companies, device companies, hospitals, clinics, and the list goes on and on. And one of the things that I realized that oftentimes these organizations were told by their boards of directors or their president, let’s innovate around here, let’s become more innovative. So they would take a swipe at it and build out a bumper sticker. Then put a few beanbag chairs and whiteboards in a corner office and call it an innovation center. And that was pretty much it. They never really committed to developing a true innovation roadmap that was deployable and sustainable. That delivered measurable results because of course they do. They just wanted to go through the paces and move on. Back to legacy latency and risk centrism, bomber. Those organizations are now bankrupt in many cases are failing and being displaced by new disruptive innovators. This is life and death stuff here. If you don’t learn it, your organization and you as a leader, could be in great jeopardy. Here’s a few anatomical features of the new c 19 economy. The C 19. Economy is consumer centric. In other words, it’s all about the customer.
No, no, I mean, it’s really all about the customer.
I’m going to tell you about customer service here.
I’m talking about architecting friction free experiences are delicious, they’re beautiful. They’re customized and most importantly, they’re relevant.
Now,
if you’ve practiced in practice any of the old fashioned methods of customer experience design, chances are, they’re irrelevant. I am a known critic of things like Net Promoter Score and some of the old fashioned institutionalization of trying to get ideas about what our patients or consumers think about us.
We have to go way beyond that way beyond that.
So, if your organization the C 19, economy doesn’t have a contemporaneous customer experience strategy, you are and forgive the drama here, doomed. The fight. The big fight is for over the customers in a shrinking market. In a shrinking economy. The fight is customer acquisition, and customer retention. And yes, I’m calling patients customers. In fact, in my consulting practice, I won’t even do customer experience consulting until the CEO is willing to utter the words that their patient is a constituent or a consumer and that they’re delivering consumerized products. I’ve had physician leaders and organizations tell me that it’s way too indignant to suggest that a doctor is delivering a consumer product.
After all, they’re a doctor.
Unfortunately, your patients expect that you went to medical school. They expect that you are clinically efficacious. They expect that you are a safe clinician. They expect that. But they’ll judge you. They will judge you based on the experience that you deliver. Because let’s face it, they’re not medical students. They’re not physicians. They don’t know how to determine clinical efficacy. The only thing they really can tell is did I like the experience in the C 19 economy. We’re moving quickly towards the maturity and weaponization of digital health. I mean, the good news out of all of this is that we have really accelerated telemedicine and digital health just great. But it’s interesting when you look at these platforms, they have social ratings. Uh oh, you mean I can rate my doctor and that doctor can have a multi star rating just like products on Amazon? That means that the doctor needs to learn how to deliver experiences? But you know, one of the things that I’m excited about in the upcoming film, The Healthcare Cure is that we’re talking about the doctor patient relationship. And about reestablishing that beautiful experience. Not just from a consumer marketing perspective, but one that gets to understand the patients from the perspective of death ethnography. Not based on just data signals and bio signals and disease processes, we need to understand patients at the level of how they live within their tribes and their communities and their families, their stressors and so much more. We can only do that when we rearrange the value propositions in healthcare, which of course will happen in the 19th economy. So consumerization a big deal. In fact, I wrote a great book on it, if I do say so myself, called What Customers rave. And the reason I say it’s a great book isn’t because of what I did. It’s what I’ve learned from smart people. In fact, when I wrote that book, I
thought I knew what I was doing.
And really what makes the book great is I learned from the true experts that are really making beautiful customer experiences real. And I would love to actually take credit for that. But I have to say, I simply reported out what I learned from the rockstars. Make customer experience a priority in your organization. Make it real through a true cx or customer experience, strategy. And deployed with great prejudice with the implementation of measurable goals. Now let’s move on. Emerging entrepreneurs want your customer. Emerging entrepreneurs want your customers. I don’t want to call it the McDonaldization of healthcare, but I will say this it is the consumerization of healthcare. And wait a minute, wait, wait, you don’t get to say that if we deliver a consumerized experience, it’s less clinically efficacious because the truth of the matter is, it’s probably the opposite. Although there’s not a lot of good data yet to verify this. Chances are that if we do a better job of engaging patients through cx design, we probably can help them become more compliant to medical and post procedural regimens, to the pharmacological regimens to health, wellness, wellness regiments, all of these regiments we want them to do. In other words, compliance. It’s probably going to get better when we build closer relationships. I mean, it kind of makes sense, right? And, I think it probably is, where we’re heading. That we’re going to show that we can get patients healthier if we can improve the experience. A lot of people working on this right now. The signs are that that’s actually the case. Okay, so here’s another one that’s important to keep in mind is that as these emerging competitors are taking your business, they’re doing it by leveraging connection architecture. In other words, the connection of all things. You know, we experience what Google calls micro mobile moments. In other words, every day today,
today, you live to blended experience.
Guess what, tomorrow
you’re going to live a blended experience. I pull out of my driveway, the first thing I do is I go to my connected device to figure out how to get where I’m trying to go. I take a look at the weather.
I checked my email.
I find out where I want to go, what I want to buy. Everything is on my connected device. It’s part of my brain. It’s part of my connection to the world. So if we don’t develop connection architecture, and the utilization of enabling technologies to be able to deliver better value to our patients that are of course, highly digitally connected, we lose. In fact, one study suggests that as much as 98% of patients begin their medical journey, always through a search on a connected device. It’s probably not going away anytime soon. In fact, it tends to be more and more embedded each and every day. What’s your connection architecture strategy? What’s your digital strategy?
How are you leveraging data analytics?
Are you building data command centers? And the list goes on and on and on. We need to be digital innovators. We need to be digital innovators. I know it’s hard to believe that we need to learn all these new tricks. And one of the problems I have is a lot of the executives that I work with on the consulting side of my life, they’re sort of not very inclined to learn new things or to adopt change or to understand the mind of the emerging consumer. And that’s unfortunate. Because this isn’t just about marketing or you know business. It’s about doing a better job of connecting with patients. Patients experience health care in a blended way. They’re going to Google their diagnosis. They’re going to Google their symptoms. They’re going to get insights from other people that have been diagnosed with similar conditions are the same conditions on resources like.
patients like me for an example.
Their experience is digital and it’s blended, and we need to be present and we need to be valuable. And that’s an important part of where the future of C 19 is in healthcare. I think that also, this is the time to ask ourself some very basic questions as
I close up this podcast today.
This is really good news.
This is really good news. We know that the future in the way in which we can anticipate to predictive analytics through continuous patient monitoring Through all kinds of incredible new technologies, we know we can get patients to a healthier state. We know that we can leverage game mechanics and social engagement to help them comply to wellness and prevention regimens. We know we can find bad signals early on to continuous patient monitoring to intervene before a disease process is so advanced, that they lose options. We know that the value is there, we know it’s there. And we know that it is coming in. In many cases, it’s already here.
So we have to adopt this stuff.
But remember, the rate of change is fast. So we have to dump our DNA of latency legacy. We have to get rid of our risk mindset, our risk centrism because you can’t move forward. One of the things they teach racecar drivers is that if you want to go fast around a racetrack, a couple hundred miles an hour or so, rule number one is never look at the wall. Because if you look at the wall, you’re gonna go to the wall. If you do that it’s really bad. We move towards the things that we focus on most of the time, according to Dr. Denis Waitley. I think he’s right. Let’s focus on the opportunity and not the disaster. If we really want to move our organizations and our patients in a direction of significant improvements in care, intervention, prevention, wellness, dissipation, all of this stuff that we want to have happen requires that we actually commit to innovation. Not the corner office with the beanbags and the white whiteboard, not the bumper sticker, not the slogan. I mean, actually really committing to innovation. Because without that we’re gonna lose to the people who have developed thoughtful innovation. So before I go, what does that look like? The best organizations conduct an innovation readiness assessment. They take a look at the people, the products, the plan. You take a look at all of the moving parts within the organization. To find out how can we do this better? How can we be more lean more financially viable? How can we identify new opportunities to serve our patients? How can we remove friction? How can we remove waste? How can we improve our agility and flexibility? How can we be more relevant in a time of digital health? And then from there from this assessment, they build out a thoughtful 18 point innovation roadmap that actually gives them the instrumentation to deliver on the promise of innovation. Done this for a long time and I gotta tell you, that’s what’s required. Remember this that basically the C economy can be defined by one word. Some people like to use the word disruption. That’s probably right. It’s moving fast. And it’s the nature of the moves are big. But I’d like to say that there’s a simpler way to describe it. Differentness. We are in a time of differentness. Our patients are different. The tools are different. The economy is different. The marketplace is different. The emerging competitors are shockingly different. So what do you do to square up in a time of differentness? Think about that. What do you do? I think the answer is newness. If things are different, our old stuff is irrelevant. So we got to create new stuff, new products, new experiences, new models, new business systems, tools and processes. C 19 is about differentness innovation. Innovation is about newness. Have you institutionalized newness? If not,
you might want to think about it.
Listen, thanks so much for listening to this episode sorry for the drama and severity. But I have to say that I feel that this is the best time in the world to be in healthcare. We’ve never had more tools and more opportunities to help people. This is a turning point.
And we can rise to the occasion,
leverage the instrumentation of new economic models, new value models, new clinical models, the consumerization and the methods that we serve it. The incredible opportunities that are within our grasp right now to shift from a hyper interventional sickness focus to one of anticipation and prevention. That is the big shift. It is happening. And my final call to action here is why not join the movement?
You’ve been listening to the Healthcare Cure podcast. Don’t forget to visit our website at the healthcarecure.com and thanks for listening
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