Today in health, it, what it will take to maintain the accelerated pace of innovation in healthcare post pandemic. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in health. It a channel dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. VMware has been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health professionals. Since the start. They recently completed an executive study with MIT on the top healthcare trends, shaping it, resilience, covering how the pandemic drove unique transformation in healthcare. This is just one of the many resources they have for healthcare professionals. For this and several other great content pieces. Check out vmware.com/go/healthcare. Alright to today's story. And this comes from the people at health evolution. And the story is what it will take to maintain an accelerated pace. Of innovation in healthcare, post pandemic. This is really a panel discussion and they turned the panel discussion into an article. And so I'm going to share some of the excerpts. Now that the pandemic has revealed how fast care organizations can move. CEOs and executives are asking pertinent questions about how long they can continue operating at this new speed. The moderator had this to say, how do we change the culture of medicine and pick up on what happened in COVID, which is we adopted a new pace of change. A new sense of urgency to respond to a clear and present danger. How do we actually feel the other types of danger that aren't necessarily clear and present to accelerate the pace of change within healthcare more broadly asked such in Jane. MD president and CEO of scan, group and health plan. During the health evolution summit in 2021 in late August. Joining Jane on the stage where John Perlin MD president of clinical operations and chief medical officer at HCA. Far as I'd most Ashari M D CEO and founder Aledade and Chris Chen MD, CEO of Chen. And this is what they had to say. This is the moment that really is disruptive. COVID has forced change. To quote, a famous philosopher, Yogi Berra, the future. Ain't what it used to be. Perlin said the future has been accelerated and there are things. That are incremental, but I think COVID forced us to think differently to really think about a step change in performance. Scaling innovation describing HCA as a large corporation with a soul of a startup. Perlin said its leaders are really thinking about how to use the speed and the digital backbone to enable a new way of doing business to drive and scale innovation. HCA established a new division called care transformation and innovation. To determine ways to leverage digital enablement tools for care providers. The question for us is number one, how do we scale faster? And number two, how do you scale the simple, rather than thinking about all the overwhelming amount of complexity? Chen added They go on to talk about financial incentives. The first step is aligning the incentives. Otherwise healthcare organizations will continue doing exactly what they do in a fee for service model and keep growing larger and larger. Most of the Shari said healthcare needs a robust program focused on competition policy because if there is no competition, then none of this matters. The game is still the fee for service game to get as big as you can to become as much of a dominant player as you can. Most of the stories said Chen noted that healthcare policy and practices need to transition from being rewarded for more acute cases, more expensive care, more complications, and more preventable, catastrophic events. And move upstream to prevention to create a strategy that expects large systems to transform themselves is probably not the right strategy. Chen said. The right strategy actually is to find the folks. Who have something to gain to grade something new. That will drive substantial change. And with the government enabling that and supporting you actually get an exponential effect. They talk about policies. Jane recounted that when he was an undergraduate student, the common answer to every healthcare problem was that the us needs a new health policy. I would say we've had a renaissance over the last decade and a half coming out of the high-tech act. Coming out of the affordable care act. Where you have a lot of new policies. Jane said, Most of Shari added the policymakers cannot simply flip the switch and take a break. Instead they have to be constantly vigilant to make sure things are going well. People underestimate in policy-making the importance of polishing the stone. None of these programs were perfect the day they came out. So you have to continually use policy to grind away the rough edges and make it work. Most of the jury said. If that happens, then we will have policy tailwinds. And I think that is the key that iteration, that sense that we're going to fix it. The panel closes with this understanding and articulating what shape an ideal future should take is one thing, developing and executing a comprehensive strategy to make that a reality is much harder. Scaling innovation is of course challenging, changing financial incentives and refining government policies. We'll naturally require some degree of public private collaboration. As well, removing the barrier that make true transformation possible in healthcare. All of these will take time and must be performed without neglecting patient care and safety. This is about as close as you get to the metaphor of changing the engine while the plane is flying, Perlin said. We need the mechanism. So this is not only a safe flight. But a fast flight that takes us to an environment where care is better. And certainly more affordable and efficient. All right. That's the article for today. I really liked this article for a lot of reasons, but here's my, so what on this? And as you know, at the end of all these stories, I try to do a, so what, why does this matter? Why should we care? And. When I think about what I take away from this story, clearly understanding the playing field is an important aspect of what we do in technology. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. We have policy financial incentives and the culture of healthcare. We have to understand what is possible. In that world and what stands in the way? A lot of what stands in the way of us scaling our solutions is inherent in the policies, financial incentives in the existing culture. When things align, like say in the case of a global pandemic and a bunch of bears come down. We saw how quickly things can move. There's a hope that healthcare will maintain this pace. And a lot of organizations are looking towards it and technology to maintain that pace. The reality is that a majority and I mean, a vast majority of technology projects in healthcare require a receptive culture and an incentive to change, which creates a receptive culture. Never underestimate the people, work, the culture work in setting the table for a successful it project. This has been overlooked more times than I can count technology. Isn't magic people often operate in a way that supports their own self-interest. If doctors aren't paid in alignment with the expansion of telehealth, then the outcome faces long odds of being successful. There's work to do that has nothing to do with technology before you launch any projects. And a lot of times, and it's the hardest part of any project. All right. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. 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