This is not our first crisis as healthcare leaders, yet it is perhaps the most transformational one. Heroes have emerged across the industry. From the first surge, our clinicians and service workers have stormed to the front lines with courage, creativity, skills, and grit. Leading through this crisis has become its own odyssey: a 24/7 challenge to save patients, protect staff, meet community needs, and stabilize the financial health of our organizations.
Your bravery, compassion, and personal commitment have further proven the value of health systems to our nation. However, this pandemic is also a painfully stark reminder of how much health systems must evolve to thrive. As leaders, we must seize this moment to reimagine care.
Over the past few years, it has been clear that the digital transformation of healthcare—if not immediate—was inevitable. The pandemic has now eliminated any temptation to leave this to the “next leader” or a new 5-year plan. AI-enabled symptom checkers, triage chatbots, virtual visits, and remote monitoring became the other heroes of the first Covid-19 surge. The exponential scaling of these digital capabilities made it possible to navigate an unprecedented peak in demand for health services—and they can future-proof systems now for what lies ahead.
As some parts of the U.S. are still preparing for a surge, others are beginning to emerge into a period of “rolling recovery,” with intermittent episodes of new hotspots, equipment shortages, and an increased need to focus on cash flow for future survival. Scenario planning will force new expectations, services, and business models for care going forward. At every stage, digital capabilities—from virtual care to predictive analytics to automation—will be the critical enabler of scaled impact and a predictor of health system success or failure. This demands that digital transformation immediately become part of every C-suite leader’s ‘day job.’ It can no longer be largely the domain of Chief Innovation Officers and a small but innovative subset of health system CEOs and executives.
The First Surge
Timing and impact still vary by geography, but the challenges of the first surge and the importance of digital solutions have been felt universally. With call centers and emergency departments beyond capacity, strained by both fearful healthy and sick patients, digitally-enabled solutions have been life-saving and scalable. Online symptom checkers, community-wide texting platforms, website and portal chatbots, and virtual triage continue to alleviate fear and frustration by reassuring the ‘worried well’ and directing sick patients to appropriate care.
The shortage of PPE and insufficient hospital beds forced us to think about care models that keep caregivers and patients at a distance—creating lasting changes. Remote monitoring and other virtual health solutions are making it possible for less symptomatic COVID patients and others with chronic conditions to be monitored and treated at home, saving precious bed capacity and preserving lifesaving PPE.
These and other urgent capabilities scaled on the fly to meet the surge are being vetted, rationalized, optimized, and supplemented by forward-looking leaders who understand that they will be the foundation of success for the next phases.
The Rolling Recovery
As we balance the urgency of today with the critical importance of planning for an uncertain future, digital will be essential to thriving—and in some cases, surviving. It is the untapped lever that will allow systems to grow and reduce cost while meeting the needs of their communities. Insightful leaders are already balancing cash needs with smart, targeted investments in mission-critical digital capabilities that will strongly influence success during this period, preparedness for a subsequent surge, and beyond.
Leaders are expanding focus on how to safely resume elective surgeries and ambulatory services—and leveraging digital capabilities to increase confidence, enhance safety, bolster trust, minimize in-person time, and create connectedness and confidence in care management. They are strengthening virtual care models erected quickly in the surge to continue to attract new patients and retain existing ones. They are planning for soaring Medicaid enrollment and payer mix changes by looking to digital to effectively and efficiently meet community and patient needs ranging from chronic care to support for new moms and babies.
As they look to financial sustainability, smart leaders are seeking lasting changes to their revenue cycle that will serve them now and in the new normal. Scaling robotic process automation and other automation capabilities will drive substantial improvements in cost and speed by reducing costly bottlenecks from prior authorizations and denials and patient payment processes.
The New Normal
In the new normal, digital prowess will prove existential for many—and important to all. Health systems will need to master hardened consumer expectations for convenience and transparency, reduce cost, and manage populations in a new economic reality—all while helping a workforce that had been struggling with burnout before the pandemic. None are easy; all are critical. Each requires digital excellence.
Consumer expectations are altered forever. The ‘digital genie’ is out of the bottle, and healthcare consumers will never go back to a world that requires an onsite visit to get every simple question answered or symptom checked. Reimbursement and regulations will be forced to evolve in the face of unrelenting patient demand and the unplanned experiments of the pandemic. Leveraging automation to reduce cost will continue to be a table stakes issue, heightened by increasing consumer demands for transparency. Managing populations in risk-bearing entities will be essential, but made easier by today’s powerful predictive analytics capabilities, data integration tools, and proven virtual care models.
Future-proofing
Future-proofing our health systems will require leaders to recognize that healthcare will never be the same. The pandemic is creating enduring changes and an opportunity to accelerate the moves we saw as inevitable: consumer- and patient-centric care, the transformation of ambulatory care, streamlined clinical offerings, profitability at Medicare—or even Medicaid—rates, and the analytics and precision population management skills required to thrive in value-based care.
Together, we need to seize this chance to improve the future.
Photo: marrio31, Getty Images
