By Shelly Carolan Multiple disruptive trends continue to alter the healthcare landscape. This is the first of a four-part series to share our insights into...
By Shelly Carolan
Multiple disruptive trends continue to alter the healthcare landscape. This is the first of a four-part series to share our insights into these trends and to identify the leadership qualities, skills and vision required to navigate them. Let’s begin by examining the changing provider landscape: where care is taking place.
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Today’s healthcare provider landscape has evolved dramatically over the years. Services previously delivered only in acute hospitals are now being offered in various settings with hybrid care solutions increasingly at the forefront.
There are many catalysts for this evolution including: value-based care, cost reductions, technological advancements, changing quality metrics and shifting consumer expectations, all of which affect where care is delivered.
A timeline of the provider landscape evolution – “the where” of care – follows:
Value-based care will continue to have an impact on the provider landscape and on need for increased digitization, data sharing and advanced analytics. With many having experienced telehealth for the first time during the pandemic, consumers of healthcare will accelerate their desire for anytime, anywhere access. This will pressure institutional, group and individual providers to accelerate facility, technology and talent investment in these capabilities.
However, consumerization of care is about more than access. The consumer/patient experience must evolve to integrate the entirety of the health management continuum — namely health and wellness programs, transparent provider pricing and quality comparisons, provider/patient relationship management to promote continuity of care, benefit determination and coordination, and billing and care finance. While experiences are improving around many of these elements individually, they still are widely disparate. To meet the promise of care consumerization, the experience must evolve to be integrated and across systems.
Large health systems may be in the best position to achieve this promise as they already represent the intersection and integration of many points along the healthcare continuum. To this end, we are seeing investment focus among traditional and new entry providers shift from pure consolidation and provider-based vertical integration to enabling technologies that support a consumer-oriented omnichannel care experience. Of note are private equity and venture capital investments by multiple not-for-profit systems, Walmart’s evolved healthcare rollout, Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical, and CVS’s public remarks regarding its own acquisition ambitions.
Together, provider and consumer/patient experiences will impact how healthcare organizations look to create value. The provider landscape is intricate and integrated. Therefore, these shifts have a profound impact across the broader healthcare ecosystem.
Healthcare leadership teams will be challenged to evolve to meet the demands of this future landscape. Foundationally, leadership teams and individual leaders must be adaptable, comfortable with ambiguity, growth-oriented, and embody a strategic mindset. New skills, such as those often associated with technology-enabled services (e.g., pricing, customer support, partnering, data management and analytics), will be required to create new business models, processes and infrastructure. Culture must evolve to embrace a diverse, consumer-centric mindset. Lastly, new performance metrics will be required to assess and reward leaders at all levels of the organization.
As investors and healthcare organizations address this future, their strategies should incorporate these leadership implications quickly as a primary focus. They must plan the leadership needs of the future, assess team capabilities and augment them with new leaders possessing the requisite skills. Key to organizations’ future success will be creating the team structures and dynamics to excel and establish the culture that wins in this new and evolving environment.