Jake Crampton serves as Chief Executive Officer for Medspeed.
On April 1st, Jake will speak at Becker's Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 1-4, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Jake's session, click here.
Question: What do innovators/entrepreneurs from outside healthcare need to better understand about hospital and health system leaders?
Jake Crampton: Healthcare is an enormous and vital sector both for our economy and our societal well-being. Given that, we should all want it to get better, which only happens through change and innovation. And, that kind of disruption can be aided by outsiders with ideas unrestrained by experience. But, healthcare is different than most other industries in that it deals in matters of life and death. This is both a necessary regulator on unrestrained experimentation and a motivator for improvement. It also makes healthcare a space that is unusually mission driven.
So, to my eyes, this makes our industry one that calls for innovation forged through insider/outsider collaboration. I say this not only from a sort of academic vantage point, but as a reflection of MedSpeed’s experience as a once outsider. Looking back, our original ideas had some merit, but they only became truly valuable with the input and commitment of the health system leaders who have pushed us forward.
Q: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?
JC: MedSpeed provides healthcare transportation services, what we call intra-company logistics. Technology plays an essential role in providing high quality, efficient service and generating the information we need to deliver exceptional value to our health system customers. This year, we are launching the 4th generation of our MedConnect technology platform. While MedConnect has been proven to the industry leading platform, we are working on the next generation as part of our ongoing investment into greater technology-driven value creation. This stems from one of our core cultural tenets, that “We get better every day.” In this endeavor, we have sought to apply that by asking ourselves a key question: Given all that we know, if we were starting today from scratch, what would our systems and processes look like? We are super excited to see the answer go into practice soon.
Q: Can you share some praise with us about people you work with? What does greatness look like to you when it comes to your team?
JC: I would absolutely love to share praise for our team. They are amazing. In them I see greatness in two principal ways. First, it is the day in-day out provision of an unglamorous, but absolutely vital, service that plays a role in millions of patient interaction every year. It is not easy to pull together all the pieces to produce great results at scale. For all the roles that systems and processes play in making this happen, the human elements of commitment and caring are the most important. Our team has this in spades.
The other, and perhaps more easily visible, form comes around events that fall well outside the norm. Unfailingly, when confronted by these types of over the top challenges, our MedSpeeders rise to go well beyond the expected. These are defining moments that show who we are and the commitment our team has to delivering health.