Four generations of NESHS Presidents, including our own Wendy Weitzner.
This past October, Innova’s Wendy Weitzner and Damiana Andonova attended the NESHS Conference “Breaking Our Own Rules: Provider-Initiated Disruption.” The event brought together strategic planning, business and network development, and design professionals in New England to hear from experts on how provider-led disruption manifested in their organization and how to empower providers to innovate.
As examples,
- Providence Healthcare’s Sunita Mishra, MD, MBA spoke about her journey from provider to administrator. She underscored the importance of identifying and permitting passionate leaders to innovate by leveraging evolving technology to meet the needs of the modern patient. She spoke about her successes with Providence’s non-subsidized retail-like primary care offering, ExpressCare which focuses on provider and patient experience.
- Paul Martino from VillageMD delivered a passionate speech about overcoming difficulties in healthcare, and the challenge in driving and sustaining change. He recognized that we all want change, that we often know what we want to change and yet still, we encounter a significant resistance to change especially in large complex organizations with long histories.
- Carla Small, Executive Director of Innovation & Operational Effectiveness at Boston Children’s Hospital, spoke about some of the bleeding-edge work done to support clinician-led innovation with the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator and the importance of “active rejections” which provide effective feedback to clinicians to further hone their ideas.
- Victoria Vacaro, Project Manager of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, described some of the work being done to support clinicians interested in using technology innovation to improve patient access and patient experience.
- And Sarah Wirth with ECG Management Consultants described how the traditional ways of meeting consumer expectations are increasingly ineffective and how some provider organizations are reorganizing to provide seamless access and coordinated referrals.
The conference drew upon themes trending in the industry today:
- Learning from other industries: What do Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Uber do well? How can we adopt solutions from other industries and tailor them to address challenges in healthcare?
- Engaging clinicians in problem-solving and innovation: How can we elevate and empower clinicians of all levels to problem-solve, innovate, and participate in meaningful change?
- Consumer is king: patients have more options, are becoming price conscious, and demand more convenience from their providers
Is your organization planning with disruptive innovation in mind? The Innova Group brings tools, techniques, and expertise to help you develop both visionary and practical long-range plans.
By Damiana Andonova | November 2019
