Navigating Disruption: Week 5 — We Become an Essential Service
A Live Documentary of a Disruptor’s Disruption
We are “disruptors.” We are a healthcare technology start-up focused on eliminating waste in the healthcare system by disrupting traditional operating practices. But now COVID-19 has disrupted the disruptors. Throughout the pandemic, we will document the thoughts we have, the plans we make, the risks we take, and the choices we face. Here is our story, one week at a time.
Recap:
Week 0 — Flying High
Week 1 — The Crashing Lows
Week 1.5 — Our Ethos
Week 2 — Do the right thing
Week 3 — The Plan for Strategic Burn
Week 4 — Recalibration
Week 5: We Become an Essential Service
On a random Tuesday evening in mid-April around 9:30 PM, I logged into Edgility’s Google Analytics page. What I found astonished and heartened me. Over 200 users were simultaneously on our website, actively using our Toolkits. (attached screenshot below). To me, this is clear confirmation that we are company providing value. That so many are working so late at night with our product speaks volumes. For a CEO, this is a pinnacle.
Why is this important?
Our toolkits are designed to support healthcare systems when they need it the most. For us to be of value requires that we stay ahead of the curve. Our toolkits cannot answer yesterday’s problems. We need to be aware of the challenges our clients face in real-time, and we must correctly anticipate what they’ll need weeks in advance. The fast-evolving pandemic adds a layer of complexity.
Our relevance as a business and a business partner is our precision and our accuracy. Offering our Toolkits for our clients is challenging, but we want to provide them to every health system in the country.
Five weeks after our initial Toolkit offering, we are now in our 4th product release. Five weeks into our journey also witnesses our base expanding to over ~400 interested users and growing each week. That we can inspire users to access Edgility’s website to utilize our toolkits is a testimony to our product and our team. We are producing a crucial commodity. We have become an essential and integral healthcare technology company. We Become an Essential Service
What gap are we filling?
We believe the primary reason for our Toolkit success stems from our understanding of the healthcare system. We understand the silos that exists within any health system. As the illustration below shows, despite all the investments in technologies the care providers are often left to navigate to the right information at the right time while they are managing Length of Stay, Readmissions, HCAHPS and Throughput. All while taking care of the patient.
We know first-hand that between the time a service for a patient is identified and prescribed to the time it is delivered, an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes activity occurs. This activity is both technological — orders electronically transferring between two or (many) more systems, for example, to personnel interacting among two, and usually many more, colleagues. Embedded in these transfers and integrations exists a multitude of competing initiatives and protocols. Distractions are plenty; priorities are muddled. The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified these distractions, leaving healthcare systems scrambling for real-time, actionable information. The patient service inevitably becomes bogged down in the bureaucracy of technology, departments, and personnel — the all too common “silo” dilemma.
We know from study and first-hand experience that silos, by design, lack systemic thinking. This absence is the reason why health systems continually scramble despite the investments they have made in technology, people, and structure. By applying human centered design, design-thinking and systems engineering health systems can reduce the noise, operate effectively, and reach desired outcomes.
