Becker's 12th Annual Meeting Speaker Series: 3 Questions with Janet Guptill, President and Chief Executive Officer, Scottsdale Institute

Janet Guptill, serves as President and Chief Executive Officer at Scottsdale Institute. 

Janet will serve on the panel "Women in Leadership: Journeys of Re-Invention, Rebound and Resiliency" at Becker's Hospital Review 12th 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 in Chicago from April 25-28, 2022. 

To learn more about the conference and Janet's sessions, click here.

Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?2?

Janet Guptill: Anything that enhances the consumer/provider relationship experience. Digital tools help us redefine and strengthen the traditional physician/patient relationship for the 21st century as one between a consumer and the extended care team. These innovations not only tighten the consumer connection with the health system, they strengthen personal responsibility for health. Technology already enables a consumer to do basic tasks like scheduling, refilling prescriptions and reading lab tests. Today we can use technology to empower the consumer as the most important part of the care team. Independent of time and physical location, consumers can communicate with care providers on symptoms, become their own healthcare advocates and act on wellness, treatment and chronic-disease management protocols. All of that can happen virtually.

I’m also excited about data and analytics; we’re getting much more experienced on how to mine the knowledge of what works, what doesn’t and why. It took us a long time just to be able to collect data, standardize it and simplify ways to retrieve, visualize and interpret information. In essence we’re now conducting “clinical trials” all the time via data mining, and we can look at patient characteristics across the country, even across the globe. We’re much more able to ask and answer questions quickly around diagnostic and therapeutic effectiveness to shorten the adoption curve of new best practices. Now we need to focus on making these advancements in computing capabilities in medicine translate into new health system delivery strategies, and that’s exciting.

Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?

JG: First, I believe the glaring light it cast on inequities in our health system, ones that reflect the systemic inequities in our society at large, can no longer be hidden. Now we’re addressing these inequities externally with patients and consumers and internally within our workforce.

Second, our ability to innovate has been proven—we pivoted quickly to virtual care, worked from home and found novel workarounds for onsite tasks. What’s most impressive is that we learned we could. In telehealth, for example, health systems routinely went from around five visits per week to 3,000 per day, and that change happened practically overnight. Working from home became the rule versus the exception, while necessary onsite personnel demonstrated incredible agility thanks to technology. Now that innovation mindset is permanently part of our psyche and culture.

Q: What advice do you have for emerging healthcare leaders today?

JG: I would tell them that everyone needs to speak IT: It’s inherent in how we operate and define our strategy. We must invest the time required to learn this “language” by acquiring knowledge and understanding how IT offers the ability to innovate, evaluate and move quickly. That said, we also must ensure that technology doesn’t add to the user’s burden but rather lightens it; this takes a commitment to change management, a heavy emphasis on people and process and the forethought to bake IT into the culture so that it’s simply the way we do things. 

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