Executives navigate digital-driven industry changes

New digital-focused models of care are increasingly becoming the norm in medicine. To keep up, leaders are revamping organizational strategies—a tall order in a sector often resistant to change.

“Healthcare is the only industry, the only industrialized sector of the economy, that over the past 20 years has experienced negative productivity growth,” said Jared Antczak, chief digital officer at Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Sanford Health. “We added more people rather than … [making] them more productive and [making] them more efficient.”

At Modern Healthcare’s annual Leadership Symposium, stakeholders shared their thoughts about the necessary shifts they see for the industry, including normalizing at-home services and treating patients more holistically.

Antczak sees a difference between digitization and digital transformation. Digitization moves existing processes to a digital platform, he said, while digital transformation forces leaders to reconsider care delivery as a whole.

Last year, Sanford Health received $350 million to establish a virtual care center to increase access for patients in rural and underserved areas in the Midwest. The idea is to create an ecosystem that includes e-visits, triage and remote patient monitoring.

The center is also an opportunity to build a long-term relationship with potential patients as consumers.

“I think it’s safe to say healthcare has not been historically a very consumer-centric industry,” Antczak said. “If we’re just focused on patients [on-site], then we’re coming way too late to the game.”

Dr. David Lubarsky, CEO at UC Davis Health in Sacramento, California, said patients are increasingly expecting 24/7 access to services, similar to the customer support they receive from retail titans like Amazon. He said the best way to achieve this could be through a chatbot providing information to patients for self-care and possibly self-treatment.

Virtual care, including hospital-at-home, can be a tool to move services out into the community and help patients avoid the emergency department, said Dr. Bruce Leff, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Transformative Geriatric Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It’s also a lower-cost option, compared with operating an inpatient hospital bed, he said.

Although telehealth has been around for decades, the pandemic was a major turning point in pushing health systems to expand beyond brick-and-mortar facilities, said Dr. Anne Klibanski, president and CEO at Mass General Brigham in Boston.

“Sometimes I hear these discussions: Did we invent home hospital last year? It’s like, no,” Klibanski said, drawing laughs from the crowd. “It’s the implementation, execution, motivation to do so and how we pay for it that keeps us from moving forward.”

Mass General plans to increase its hospital-at-home program to 200 beds over the next two-and-a-half years. At-home patients will be treated via virtual appointments and in-person visits from some providers.

Ramping up such an initiative is far different from releasing a new device or pill.

At Mass General, a separate team will run the program but still be embedded in the overall operations workflow, Klibanski said. It is critical for employees to be trained in this type of care delivery, she added.

Leaders pointed to the importance of teamwork—and humility—when undertaking innovative projects. Last year, Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and Oakland, California-headquartered Kaiser Permanente invested in Medically Home Group, a Boston-based technology platform that helps monitor patients at home.

“Within healthcare as a whole, where do we really bring the most value and where maybe should we partner, should we collaborate, should we work with others?” said Dr. Richard Gray, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Arizona. “That is something that we should take away from our experience over the last couple of years.”

Download Modern Healthcare’s app to stay informed when industry news breaks.