Navigating Disruption: Week 7 — Chaos and Clarity
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
Week 6 : The Rae of Sunshine
Week 7: Chaos and Clarity
Merriam-Webster defines chaos as “a confused mass or mixture”; ‘the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system.”
As humans, we study chaos scientifically, theoretically, and philosophically. Is chaos the natural order, and we spend time and effort trying to tame it or is clarity the natural order and we can’t help but turn it chaotic? Whatever you may conclude, we as a company have used the “chaos-of-COVID” to achieve some clarity. Understanding this interplay between chaos and clarity is a hard-earned maturation for all of us at Edgility.
While COVID-19 is a crash course in managing disruption, we are using this disruption to understand a complex problem better.
Understanding Complexity
We believe the decades-old “management-consulting” mindset has compartmentalized healthcare into siloes — distinct and separate service lines and business units — to break down the “complexity” into manageable chunks. This compartmentalization was driven by and a cause for the reimbursement models of the ’80s and the ’90s, which only served to further ingrain this single mindset. The push for electronic medical records in the 2000s digitally “hardwired,” these silos. We “codified” them into place. From an analytics standpoint, siloed and vertical structuring of healthcare operations resulted in data produced, stored and locked within siloed and disparate information systems. As a result, healthcare IT shops spent the better part of the 2010s integrating data sources. We solved the symptom!
Compartmentalization is stifling innovation. However, what may be slightly more accurate is that we’ve squeezed as much innovation as we can from within each silo. Innovation must be realized elsewhere. We believe innovation resides in abundance in ‘system-ness.’
System-Avoidance
Venture capital and other investors tend to support small-scale innovations and avoid systemic healthcare problems. For example, it is easy to fund an app that helps manage diabetes. While a critical function, the app does not address how health systems use the data. The size, magnitude, and complexity of healthcare operational challenges discourage systemic innovation and transformation. That only leaves filling the cracks and fissures of each silo.
Exposed raw
Thanks to COVID-19, these past eight to ten weeks once again highlighted the siloes. With all the investments in technology, we find hospitals and healthcare systems operating with excel sheets and pivot tables. The use of telehealth is pushing the customer expectations, but the health systems are grossly underpowered to take on the additional capacity without systemic redesign.
As we discussed the gaps in Week 5, one outcome is clear; there is little systemic thinking. We believe this is the primary reason health systems continually scramble despite substantial investments in technology, people, and structure.
Lack of Awareness
Imagine you’re a patient in a hospital. Wouldn’t you like to have a plan on what will happen and when it will happen? Wouldn’t you want to know when the doctor is coming to round, when you might go for a test, or perform rehab? Shouldn’t you know that? Why does everything that happens in a hospital seem opaque to you as the patient? The answer is simple: it is opaque to the health system, too. The semblance of normalcy is maintained by the heroic and indefatigable nurses and doctors that scramble to make things happen despite the fractures in the organizational structures. Scrambling is the “chaos” we experience. This is the chaos that makes healthcare more expensive. This is the chaos that makes healthcare less safe.
Remarkably, Amazon knows more about (the status of) delivering your package to you than a health system knows about (the status of) delivering care to their patients.
Now, imagine what if healthcare systems provide you a “patient itinerary.” This itinerary will inform you, the patient, what will happen during your stay, and when — much like logging into Amazon’s delivery tracker system which can tell you how when your package will arrive and how many houses away the delivery truck is. We believe the healthcare system should aspire to that level of situational awareness and system-ness.
The good news is, we are bold enough to meet the challenge. We see the tension caused by chaos as a driver of progress and innovation. Sometimes, perhaps often, the answer lies in the complexity.
Chaos has a way of exposing the raw complexity that hides behind the veil. And, we strategically used the chaotic upheaval instigated by COVID-19 to intimately study, understand and valdiate the gaps and opportunities in healthcare. With our toolkits, we tested our approach and solicited feedback from hundreds of health systems.
We have rapidly aligned our technology niche — Cognitive Platform for an “Air-traffic control” like orchestration command center — to the long term need for reengineering healthcare for the 21st century.
Week 8 : TBD
