Building Enterprise Resilience: Putting the Human Touch Back into Healthcare

This past year has been a roller coaster for healthcare industry executives, with continued uncertainty around healthcare and tax reform in Washington. Couple this with natural disasters in Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida and California that wreaked havoc on entire healthcare systems, and cyber security breaches that exposed to hackers the personal information of over 140 million people, the healthcare industry is being forced to chart a path forward amidst significant challenges that will not be resolved anytime soon.

In this environment, I’m often asked by clients and colleagues alike what can be done now to stay ahead, while the business implications of industry changes remain unclear. My perspective is that organizations cannot hold back and take a ‘wait and see’ approach, they need to lean into the changes and proactively consider key areas for strategic investments. Regardless of what happens on the policy front and no matter what new hurdles emerge in 2018, our industry must stay laser focused on our single greatest challenge: deliver quality, affordable healthcare to patients in need.

To do this, I believe our industry must find ways to make healthcare more human again – or create strategies and capabilities that put patient needs at the center, while at the same time remaining nimble and able to adapt to environment changes. While not easy, this can be done using three different but complementary approaches.

1. First, focus on cross-sector collaboration. The biggest challenges of our time can’t be solved by working in siloes. We need to expand the borders of healthcare – this means thinking beyond the four walls of the hospital and looking holistically at the full profile of a patient, beyond their specific disease. For example, how does a person’s inability to pay for nutritious foods impact their diabetes? How can entire health systems come together to tackle the societal issues that impact a patient’s health? Some providers and insurers are broadening their care teams to include nutritionists, behavioral health specialists, social workers and community health workers trained in addressing nonmedical health-related issues. PwC estimates this could save providers $1.2 million a year per 10,000 patients in a value-based payment environment. One example is a hospital system in Ohio, which employed screenings and interventions for food insecurity and as a result saw a 3% drop in emergency room visits, a 53% drop in hospital readmissions, and a 4% increase in primary care visits.
2. Second, healthcare executives can make strategic investments to improve patient experience in order to change behaviors and improve health outcomes. Today’s consumer is used to sophisticated shopping experiences, in which retailers harness consumer information to tailor how they interact with customers. Health companies will need to take this same approach and obtain a 360-degree view of patients to engage them. Measures that can help organizations more completely tailor services to patients include supplementing demographic profiles with information on the preferences and social circumstances that shape patients’ everyday health decisions, including cultural values, work and home commitments and neighborhood dynamics.
3. Finally, the healthcare industry must focus on creating efficiencies and cutting down bureaucracy that takes time away from one-on-one connections with patients. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the rise of artificial intelligence and other health tech will not lead to cold and impersonal healthcare. These advances could actually help put the human touch back into healthcare by reducing administrative duties that don’t impact a patient’s health, such as finance processes, record keeping, and other repetitive tasks. One example is in analyzing routine radiology results. Often radiologists get tired and can become less accurate at reading results over the course of a shift. By using AI to do an initial screen of results, a radiologist’s attention can be directed toward a potential problem area, catching patient issues that may otherwise have been missed.

Healthcare companies cannot let uncertainty in the marketplace stall their approach. No matter what headwinds we experience, we’re still going to need to care for patients dealing with the same serious health conditions in an increasingly cash-strapped environment. Those companies that continue to harness a strategy around building enterprise resilience and putting the human touch back into healthcare are likely to see an advantage in the market. For more details, check out PwC Health Research Institute’s “Top Health Industry Issues of 2018.”