David Chou serves as Vice President and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research
On May 3rd, David will speak at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership + Pharmacy conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 2-4, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and David's session, click here.
Question: What do innovators/entrepreneurs from outside healthcare need to better understand about hospital and health system leaders?
David Chou: We are witnessing many major technology companies entering the healthcare space with significant investments. That is an excellent sign where we can learn from organizations outside of the traditional healthcare market. There is one major issue that is the challenge. The vendors entering the space do not understand healthcare. Vendors have great insight from the customer's perspective and the desired expected outcome, but they do not understand the full complexity of a hospital or clinic operations. I have written a blog on this recently where the technology vendor must dive into the operations of a hospital or a clinic to create meaningful innovation. My recommendation is that the technology vendor buys a clinic or a hospital so that they can design a new operating model while creating a change to improve the quality of care at the lowest cost. Investing an outside observer is a difficult task.
Q: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?
DC: Organizations are striving to become a data-driven organization, but the challenge is that the internal structure does not align with the model. Healthcare institutions must invest in a technology platform that they will use for interoperability and data cleansing rather than allowing individual departments or divisions to purchase standalone systems that solve a departmental problem. Analytics must be an enterprise initiative, and healthcare leaders must have the data to make decisions rather than trusting their gut intuition.
Q: Healthcare takes a lot of heat for not innovating quickly. What's your take on this?
DC: If you ask the question to every healthcare leader or CIO on whether they want to lead innovation, the response would be a unanimous yes from everyone. The challenge is that rather than focusing on innovation and making the investment towards innovation, every organization is focusing on cost-cutting exercises. It is impossible to innovate when the focus is on cost-cutting, and the organization is not making the financial investment towards innovation. The main focus of cost-cutting is the challenge that I see as to why healthcare is not innovating fast enough.