Houston Methodist has accelerated digital transformation in the last few years, installing technology and AI-driven applications across the health system in addition to opening a “smart hospital” designed for the digital era.
The health system installed virtual care and ambient care sensors and cameras in every patient room enterprisewide and all patients receive a wearable sensor for vitals monitoring. They have ambient listening and sensors in the operating room and made AI investments for prediction and summarization for more personalized care. While the technology aims to support better outcomes and more efficient processes, the rapid pace of change – which is expected to accelerate – has also become a headwind by stoking staff anxiety and burnout.
Sara Pletcher, MD, chief digital health officer at Houston Methodist, said on the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” that one of the biggest challenges she faces is the “everyday resistance” to change management and change fatigue.
“That doesn’t come through as a big thing; it comes through as lots of little things, lots of little barriers, communicating, communicating again, the project management, education. The focus is often on the big challenges and not enough appreciation for this death by a million paper cuts that you can face when trying to move people forward to do things differently,” she said.
Hospitals and health systems need to transform quickly, especially as the technological and economic environment changes around them. What can leaders do to effectively transition their teams?
“It’s certainly tough,” said Dr. Pletcher. “You have to be a really resilient optimist. And being an optimist doesn’t mean you think everything is great. You can be an optimist and be very realistic about challenges as long as you can always see some way that something could be better. It’s a belief that if you remember what your true north is, your ‘why’, and you keep chipping away and trying to find little ways to make things better, then there are opportunities to make things a lot better.”
She also recommended sharing the “why” with all stakeholders, even team members who touch just a small part of the project. It’s important for everyone involved in a project to feel connected and realize their value in bringing the project over the finish line.
“Bringing realistic optimism to the table helps, and never forgetting the importance of ‘why,'” she said. “I know that’s a cliched thing to say, but it’s surprising the number of times I’m in a meeting with a small group where we’re trying to solve a really mundane thing and then stop at the beginning and just ask, ‘Do y’all know why we’re doing this overall project?'”
Team leaders can then level set and help others troubleshoot their daily challenges through the lens of overall system goals. When leaders connect the change to better patient care, the team is more likely to make the right decisions moving forward.
Then leaders can balance their short term goals with long term vision for improved performance.
“Right now we’re really trying to remember to look just a bit further ahead,” said Dr. Pletcher. “With all the challenges everyone’s facing, you do have to strike the balance between keeping your eye on the current operational design performance, but also looking ahead to try to get in front of where things are going. We’re thinking about how we’re struggling to cover certain shifts, and we have to push our current team to cover them. But if there is an opportunity for us to look ahead and say how can we redesign this to have a more sustainable workforce. The key is leaning into the bets we’ve already made, focusing on keeping current operations high performance, but looking at all of our challenge points as opportunities to try to think further ahead about what transformation opportunities we have to centralize, automate, be more precise, and think differently about how we deliver supply and demand.”
