5 New Year’s Resolutions for Healthcare Execs

The time to embrace the future is right now.

It’s a pretty safe bet that most people were happy to put 2020 behind them. That’s particularly true if you’re someone involved in running a health system. There was the stress of trying to protect and support frontline workers. The challenge of dealing with a catastrophic financial situation (health systems lost some $500 billion in 2020). And, most importantly, the toll the pandemic has taken on patients: One in a thousand Americans died as Covid-19 became the greatest cause of death in the United States.

It was also a year of accelerating change in healthcare. Thanks to the rapid adoption of things like telehealth and virtual care, the two of us see it as healthcare’s “iPhone moment,” a point in time similar to when the iPhone emerged and all sorts of new possibilities for content, community and commerce sprang up. We call this new era — which puts the consumer first, uses data and AI responsibly, and focuses on treating people when they’re well, not just delivering “sick care” — health assurance.

The emergence of health assurance will be just as enormous and just as thrilling as the arrival of the iPhone was a decade and a half ago. Everyone in the healthcare industry will have a chance to help recast sick care with a consumer-first mindset and make care for patients better than it’s ever been.

Healthcare leaders can embrace this transformation and help drive it — or risk the kind of technology-led disruption that has hollowed out so many other industries. The next decade will be to traditional healthcare what the rise of Amazon was to traditional retailers like Sears. Either jump on board, or watch yourself become irrelevant.

If you’re a leader or professional in healthcare today, here are five New Year’s resolutions you should make that can help you grab this opportunity — and contribute to the emergence of a new health assurance industry.

Resolution # 1: Be bold and put the consumer first.

For years, smart people in healthcare have known the industry should put patients in the center. That has been the topic of countless research reports, board meetings and industry conferences. While it seems like a radical idea, it just means that the healthcare industry must operate more like nearly every other consumer-facing industry.

A handful of health systems have been trying — and showing it’s possible for incumbents to find new ways of doing business. Kaiser Permanente is both an insurance company and a healthcare provider for its plan members, so that eliminates some of the perverse economics that exist in healthcare and creates more incentive for Kaiser to do what’s cost-effective for consumers. Even before Covid hit, Kaiser began offering its 4.4 million plan members in northern California options to connect with doctors via phone, email or video.

Its members have loved it. In one survey, 87 percent said video visits were more convenient than showing up in person, and 84 percent said a digital office visit improved their relationship with their physician. In other words, Kaiser found that patients like interacting with their doctor the same convenient way they interact with most other kinds of companies.

At Intermountain Healthcare, a Salt Lake City-based system of 24 hospitals and 160 clinics, CEO Marc Harrison has been trying to drive a shift to digital, consumer-first healthcare. Intermountain, for instance, started a subscription-based primary care service, often called direct primary care, which aims to keep people healthy instead of just treating them when sick. And it works: Those who use the service have a 60 percent reduction in hospital visits. Yes, that means the service eats away at one of the ways a system like Intermountain traditionally makes most of its money, but the industry needs more leaders who will break the mold, embrace new ways of serving consumers, and help us stay healthy and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals.

Resolution #2: Explore radical collaboration with “the other side.”

For too long traditional healthcare providers have looked skeptically at developers and entrepreneurs, seeing them as upstarts who don’t understand the industry. Entrepreneurs and developers, meanwhile, have too often seen traditional healthcare as an old guard that needs to be completely disrupted. Both sides need to put those mindsets aside and focus on forging creative partnerships. The reinvention of healthcare is too complex for any one sector to go it alone.

New companies are showing how consumer-centric health assurance can work. One company worth talking about is Ro, the firm behind sites such as Roman (for men’s health), Rory (for women’s health) and Zero (for smoking cessation). Ro offers an easy experience for people who want to treat a range of conditions, from erectile dysfunction and insomnia to weight management and skincare issues. You can see prices and products; communicate with a doctor online; get a prescription; order drugs; and have them delivered to your door in slick packaging that would make Apple proud. The cost and time commitment for consumers is a fraction of going to a doctor’s office, taking a prescription to a pharmacy, and only then finding out how much the drugs will cost. Investors (including Hemant’s firm) have pumped more than $375 million in funding into Ro.

Ro can operate in a consumer-friendly way because it goes around the traditional healthcare system. It doesn’t take insurance, yet is making medications and treatments more affordable for most people. It’s showing that if consumers find a cheap, easy and transparent way to treat a problem, many will choose that route even if they have health insurance. The gap between a good consumer experience and the usual experience in healthcare is that great.

Another company that’s breaking the mold is Forward, which pitches itself as membership-based, data-driven continuous primary care. In New York City, for instance, you pay $149 a month for a kind of always-on family doctor. There are doctors in an office, and you can see one as often as you want. When you sign up, you get a genetic test and blood test to start building data about your body and health. There’s a Forward app that monitors sleep, exercise and other vital signs, and adds the data to your record. A chat bot is available any time, so if you wake up at 2 a.m. with a fever, you can start a chat; if the software realizes you might have a serious issue, it will alert a live medical professional to intervene or send you to a hospital.

Why wouldn’t a healthcare system embrace something like this? Or why not partner with a company like Forward to give consumers virtualized, always-on primary care that then connects to the system’s hospitals and specialists for emergencies and acute medical problems?

In the last few years, the two of us — Steve runs Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, Hemant is a managing partner at VC firm General Catalyst — have been increasingly working together. Steve has been advising some of the health tech companies that Hemant previously funded. We’re both invested in and are helping to build an ambitious health-assurance tech platform, Commure. And we’ve partnered to launch a new company that we hope will lead to the digital transformation of healthcare.

More collaboration like ours is necessary. In order to succeed, companies need both the DNA of a healthcare provider and the DNA of a tech firm.

Resolution # 3: Rethink your business model — and who does what in your organization.

Hospitals can’t continue to believe they will survive by doing more procedures and only caring for those who show up to their hospitals, doctor’s offices or emergency departments. Scaling up to do more of that may work in the short-term, but as health assurance takes hold, that kind of operation will come to seem like the post office in the age of email.

Healthcare leaders need to lean into two ideas. The first is about revenue. Once consumers are spending their own money on health, prices will fall drastically. But that’s okay. We spend too much of our GDP on healthcare right now. And we believe healthcare providers can thrive if they leverage tech to expand their offerings and reach and become more efficient.

Which leads to the second idea: rethinking how your workforce is used. Going forward, we should use technology to handle repetitive bookkeeping tasks and retrain workers currently in those jobs for more caregiving roles. Your employees should be less focused on billing codes (something computers are good at) and more focused on empathetic, human-centric care (something computers are not good at).

That idea even extends to a new breed of doctor. Today, medical schools are filled with people who are great at memorization. In the dawning age of AI virtual assistants on smartphones in everyone’s pocket, memorized knowledge becomes less important than the very human capabilities of empathy, creativity, grace under pressure and communication. The old insurance model has driven the best students to the highest-grossing revenue types of medicine, like dermatology, radiology, orthopedics and anesthesiology. As the new model gets away from paying for procedures and evolves into paying for keeping people healthy, the most valuable doctors will be family physicians and pediatricians. Every forward-thinking medical school should start recruiting these new-era medical students now.

Resolution # 4: Focus on equity and access.

As we race into the era of connected care, we must make one principle sacrosanct: The digital revolution cannot simply make only the wealthy healthier. Like climate change, healthcare inequities represent a worldwide existential crisis and will require multiple stakeholders both within and outside the traditional healthcare system to work together.

All of this came into the spotlight during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Telehealth became the primary mode for supporting patients at home, and for many provided huge benefits. But we also saw again what we’ve long known — while most Americans have a smartphone, many don’t have access to a data plan able to support both connected care and virtual education. The ability to connect to the internet has now become a true social determinant of health.

The digital revolution is here. But it’s our responsibility to do it right, and quite simply, healthcare providers cannot do this alone. Healthcare executives should take the lead on building a new coalition of technology, government, education and business. Universal connectivity is the first step.

Resolution # 5: Let go of the past.

Ultimately, all of this comes down to embracing new beliefs. Health isn’t just about medicine; it includes all aspects of life — food, sleep, exercise, mental health, financial situation, geography. The best way to treat any illness is to treat the whole patient.

The industry must also accept that a doctor on video — or maybe even an AI-driven chat bot — can diagnose a ruptured appendix as well as a doctor in an emergency room. And healthcare will have to allow consumers more power and responsibility when it comes to their health. A lot of consumers will welcome this shift and refuse to tolerate rotten experiences. Some won’t, probably because the current players have convinced them that any other way of providing care will be a health risk.

Powerhouse players in an old industry rarely change in time to stay on top in a new era. But health professionals must play a significant role, and must embrace the idea that a shift to health assurance will be better for all of us. Providers will see lower costs, higher margins, better outcomes and more consumer loyalty. Employers will see the cost of taking care of their people go down for the first time in decades, while the well-being of their employees improves. Consumers will get the help they need to stay healthier longer and find that healthcare will eat up less of their hard-earned money.

None of this will happen overnight. But we know this much for sure: 2021 will be another big step forward.