Digital Transformation in Healthcare: Travis Ansel Of HSG Advisors On How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care

Determine what needs to be improved. But you can’t improve what you can’t measure! Practices must determine the key performance indicators for the practice/physician network and begin an assessment.

As part of our series about “Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Travis Ansel, Managing Partner at HSG Advisors.

Travis Ansel, Managing Partner, focuses on helping healthcare organizations with organizational-level strategic planning, physician alignment strategy, employed physician network strategy, and value-based care strategy. In his 10+ years in management consulting, Travis has worked with clients ranging in size from multi-hospital tertiary systems to critical-access hospitals. Travis is a frequent contributor to a number of national healthcare publications and speaks at state and national-level healthcare conferences.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’ve always loved finding ways to simplify processes and make life easier for people. I started out briefly as a non-CPA accountant while I was earning my business degree, and realized I loved working with people more than numbers. I pursued my MBA and became a consultant to a broad range of industries, before deciding to focus exclusively on healthcare. Health is the foundation of everything — without good health, everything else in our lives takes a backseat. I find it really fulfilling being able help physician networks run more smoothly so they can support people’s health.

Can you share the most interesting or most exciting story that has happened to you since you began at your company?

Clearly — the pandemic was the most exhausting and traumatic thing that has happened to the healthcare system since I began at the company, but it was exciting to see the innovation that took place industry wide, sometimes at lightning speed. Even as we emerge out of the pandemic, health care professionals are maintaining a different approach to problem solving. In employed networks, for example, many health systems lack an understanding of the cause behind losses in their network. The pandemic has prompted new interest in data-driven intelligence, capabilities to improve quality through better care coordination, managing risk contracts over the long term, and so on.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Then, can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Earlier in my career I was a consultant, so I was accustomed to diving deep into a specific issue, solving it, and then moving on to the next assignment. While it’s not a “ha-ha” type of funny, I made some mistakes in transitioning from the consultant mentality to the full-time mentality, and this seems funny to me looking back. It gives me perspective though — when I see other people going through this in employed physicians networks, I can give them the benefit of my past experience/lessons learned.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Accountable: My colleagues have told me over the years that when they ask me to do something, I’ll do it and do it well. I’m accountable for my statements, actions, and the work that I produce.

Entrepreneurial: Having an entrepreneurial mindset really means that you are a creative problem solver. When there is a problem or an obstacle that is preventing me from meeting a goal, I’ll turn it inside out, upside down, and sideways until I figure out how to get past it. This is the character trait that really helped me work with my team to develop a proprietary way of using data systematically to reveal healthcare system needs and gaps in care.

Collaborative: In my work, if you’re not collaborative, you’re going to strike out. It’s a lot like baseball — you just can’t play that game alone; it requires a team. That’s one of the things I enjoy most about this work. I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with other healthcare leaders on a workshop for the American College of Healthcare Executives. We used baseball as a concept to highlight the importance of collaboration and teamwork. We hit a home run with our presentation, “The Triple Play Workshop.”

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

Some of the most exciting projects I’m working on now include integrating technology with the consulting services we provide to hospitals and healthcare systems. We’re helping healthcare organizations plan strategically by leveraging business intelligence through analysis of outpatient engagement and usage of a healthcare system. This is a game changer for providing service to the community. Because we can track when patients are leaving a system to seek care elsewhere, we can easily see the gaps in care and then strategically recommend how to bridge those gaps. Some of the most exciting and rewarding work has been watching health systems address the needs of their communities and get it right the first time. We’ve eliminated a lot of the guesswork and identified unnecessary excess spending a hospital or health system might encounter to serve their communities. We can do this because the data and business intelligence we provide accurately guide strategic planning.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about Digital Transformation in Healthcare. I am particularly passionate about this topic because my work focuses on how practices can streamline processes to better serve their patients. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level, what does it look like for a medical practice to engage in a digital transformation?

Digital transformation is about empowerment, transparency, and insight. It’s about so much more than just creating a patient portal. By embracing technology not only in our operating rooms and laboratories but also at the very operational core of healthcare, we create the possibility of a more streamlined and effective healthcare system.

Practically, there is an upfront cost to change; and people typically resist change. The benefit is that it won’t take very long to start experiencing the benefits of digital changes. Practices have been working with electronic medical records for some time now. By engaging with innovative digital tools on the process and operations side, medical practices could start feeling improvements in patient satisfaction and in their bottom line in just a few months.

What are the specific pain points that digital transformation can help address in a medical practice?

Digital transformation is critical to the future of medical care. As a country, we’re continuing to look for ways to have disparate systems be able to “speak” to each other — for example, if one patient gets referred to a different state or different hospital practice, they need to be able to communicate this patient’s care seamlessly and digitally. However, digital transformation’s importance in healthcare extends beyond the patient’s experience. In fact, if a hospital or healthcare system is not leveraging the data and intelligence available in the market to appropriately serve their community, they may not actually be meeting the community’s needs.

Digital transformation has allowed us to help hospitals and healthcare systems make vast improvements in access to the kind of care their patients need. While not a pain point per se for every community, it’s crucial that we continue to make digital progress to efficiently support the healthcare facilities that support patients.

What are the obstacles that prevent a medical practice from engaging in a digital transformation?

Upgrading systems and making employed physician networks’ operational processes more efficient means that change is needed. Frankly, resistance to change and inadequate practice leadership are the biggest obstacles. Physician networks need a management team experienced enough to implement these changes or help them fill gaps in leadership so changes can be made, and hospitals and health systems can deliver quality care.

Physicians also worry about disrupting patient care while they upgrade or implement new operational procedures. The medical practice must be willing to commit to adaptation and let go of doing things the way they have “always been done.” As more physician practices are acquired by larger health systems, having standardized ways to engage patients, credential physicians, and bill insurance carriers becomes increasingly essential. The bumps in the road felt in the billing office will only be amplified when departments are audited, and patients receive inaccurate bills. I’ve never seen a medical practice regret engaging in digital transformation, even if there was a bit of heavy lifting at first.

Managing a healthcare facility is more challenging than it has ever been. Based on your experience or research, can you please share with our readers a few examples of how digital transformation can help a medical practice to provide better care? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

The first critical success factor in digital transformation is that it needs to be part of a strategic whole. Often in medical practices, a vision is tied to the leader at that time, and when the leadership changes, the vision changes. A medical practice can provide better care with a consistent, strategic, and shared vision. All digital transformation efforts roll up to that vision.

Next, we work with hospitals and healthcare systems to assess and develop organizational structures and management infrastructure that supports the physician network. For example, as physician networks integrate with hospitals and healthcare systems, understanding where patients are accessing care and the type of care, they need can help inform the hospital’s strategic direction. Additionally, given the increasing push to deliver care in the outpatient and ambulatory setting, hospitals and health systems must have a proactive provider development plan strongly tied to the execution of the health system’s strategic plan. This kind of strategic planning can only be done when the healthcare sector embraces data and pairs it with business intelligence.

For example, in 2020, a rural community hospital opened its expanded “hospital of the future” and optimized this new facility for overall patient growth. By working with the experts at HSG, we were able to implement data measurement and reporting to assess the needs of various service lines and plan appropriately. We looked at more than community assessments to determine which service lines needed to be grown and where the greatest need was within the community.

Initially, we focused on the urology department as the hospital had recently employed two new urologists to cover the market. We leveraged data from various resources to put the bigger picture into focus and determine how patients were using urology services in the market. By pairing this data with information on the patient’s relationship from the primary care provider to the specialists, we could examine the gaps and find out where patients left the system to get their care. By creating a custom-built digital dashboard for the various data points, hospital executives could determine which physicians needed introductions and education about the new specialists in urology. Ultimately, over the course of a year, primary care volume to urology has increased by 24%, and 755 patients have been served in their own community.

Can you share a few examples of how digital interactions or digital intake processes can help create a frictionless patient experience and increase access for patients?

Increasing patient access requires more than having enough brick-and-mortar office locations or physicians on staff to serve the community. In the past two years, hospitals and health systems have increased access for patients by finally embracing telehealth or telemedicine. Ultimately, the circumstances associated with the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed the potential of virtual health care for employed networks and caregivers across the nation.

Many organizations implemented virtual care initiatives on the fly — or accomplished their 5-year plans in 2 weeks … but under the revised rules of engagement in effect during the COVID-19 national emergency. At this point, there is no turning back. Many of the historical barriers to virtual health care have been obliterated. However, an entire back end to this virtual visit needs to be implemented correctly to reduce frustration and increase patient access.

If patients have fragmented and frustrating experiences, hospital executives probably need to take a step back and look under the hood of their organization. “Mechanical” difficulties can often be traced directly to operational inconsistencies or lagging optimization. In one situation, we found that billing rates and rules from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services hadn’t been updated at one physician network in more than ten years. This meant that not only were patients’ visits being improperly billed, the staff was also creating mountains of additional work for themselves dealing with insurance denials. Keeping up with regulatory changes and then implementing them within billing and patient tools is something that hospitals and health systems must do on an ongoing basis.

Based on your opinion and experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Effective Medical Practice” and why.

One of the ways we address medical practices or physician networks is to determine where they are in our Network Growth Curve framework. We work with hospitals and healthcare systems to ensure physician networks and medical practices move out of “operational chaos” and into “high-performing” status.

1. First, identify what it really means to be a highly effective or high-performing practice. What does this kind of practice look like, and what are the components that make it effective?
2. Then, determine what needs to be improved. But you can’t improve what you can’t measure! Practices must determine the key performance indicators for the practice/physician network and begin an assessment.
3. Make the data digestible. Typically, the problems that leadership and physicians identify within a practice are actually just the symptoms of the real problem. By putting practice and network data into a format that can be visualized, monitored, and updated regularly, the root cause of operational chaos will start to come into focus.
4. Develop a strategic plan. I know it sounds like a basic piece of advice, but it isn’t. Physicians and the executives leading physician practices are so bogged down in the day-to-day of the practice that they often miss the critical element of planning. You can’t be in triage mode and create an effective medical practice. Physicians and practice leaders must embrace a strategic mindset to align everyone within the practice and create an operational system to best serve its patients.
5. Develop a cohesive organizational culture. While so much of our world and our experiences have become digitalized and automated, we still need to fit these efficiencies and operations into a common culture. When physician practices are aligned with the health system goals and embrace a shared vision for their practice, patient needs are met, and satisfaction goes up across the board.

Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.

If you want to accomplish something, you need to combine that which is just beyond reach with what’s pragmatic. Healthcare needs to be accessible and equitable for everyone in our country. It should not be beyond reach for those without insurance or with sub-par insurance. If the healthcare industry can implement telemedicine in five weeks and institute new protocols to deal with COVID in just a few weeks as well, then I’m sure we can create a healthcare system that can be accessible to all.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

HSG has outstanding thought leadership — we publish a tremendous amount of content about the elements of physician workforce planning that drive optimal performance. We’re also industry leaders in workforce/human resource planning and provider workforce development.

People can visit https://hsgadvisors.com/thought-leadership/ and download articles, white papers, and case studies, watch videos, and learn more about our Employed Physician Networks book.

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!

About The Interviewer: David McNeil is the President of PatientPop, a Tebra company, a market leader in practice growth technology. McNeil is highly committed to helping the company build a modern go-to-market organization that delivers great value to practices in a time of rapid change in healthcare. McNeil’s business insights have been featured in publications such as Medical Economics and Los Angeles Business Journal.