Winter is Coming to Healthcare

As I rewatched the first episode of the HBO mega hit Game of Thrones and heard the doom-like trope of all the clans that “Winter is coming!” I was immediately reminded of the current emotional temperature in many US health system C-suites.

Today's Challenges are Bigger than One Crisis

• It’s the cold winds of the deepest public funding cuts still to come after 5 million people have already lost coverage, and the consequential “toughest ever, tougher even than last year” budget cycles rolling out across the land.
• It’s the disorienting snows of the large language models, exposing how poorly many organizations integrate technology into daily work.
• It’s the collapse of value-based care and population health happy talk yielding openly to what one CEO described to me as “everyone is just scrambling to grab for the same fistfuls of dollars.”

Not everything is icy. The amazing pace of biotech discovery and translation into improved clinical modalities is astonishing and hopeful. But this good news is also intimidating. How to accommodate rising clinical complexity in operations? How do you pay for it?

So, health system leaders are facing something more complicated than the Game of Thrones monarchs and clan heads.

The question is, how should health leaders frame this moment, and respond?

Build Capability while Solving Today's Problems

At Value Capture, we've long argued that leaders should respond to immediate challenges by explicitly building organizational capability as they do so. Organizations that become more adaptable and better at execution solve today's challenges faster while building capabilities that last long after today's crisis has passed.

What Prepared Organizations are Doing Differently

Rather than simply talking about what leaders should do, I'd rather point to organizations that are already doing it. Some current customers, some former customers and other close thought leadership colleagues.

Kaiser Permanente, which already produces measurably better care outcomes than other payers and providers in its markets, committing to both operational excellence at a whole new level, and open learning from previous challenges in its national roll out, resulting in a deeper commitment to experiments with new modalities of deeper partnership.

Cone Health, now part of Risant, a Kaiser-Geisinger partnership, where Mike Bundy, President of Cone’s largest region, is leading astonishing across-the-board gains through his most-powerful-in-nation distillation of Habitual Excellence principles and playbook.

The University of Tennessee, where a new generation of leaders built a model for a strengthened operating system in breakthrough perioperative work and are now rolling it out across the enterprise. As COO James Shamiyeh told me in this episode of our Habitual Excellence podcast, they are seeing great gains in metrics and spirits and finally feeling like they won’t be dealing with the same problems that come up every year or two.

And Duke University Health, which has turned to the amazing Dave Zaas MD to build on its growing momentum in matching its historic clinical excellence with the kind of operational excellence and aspirational ambition that is dramatically shrinking wait times and so much more.

The Organizations that Thrive will be Ready

An especially long and challenging winter may indeed be coming. But winter also reveals which organizations prepared before the deepening storms arrived. The leaders above remind us that the work of building better operating systems isn't about surviving one difficult season. It's about becoming the kind of organization that can thrive through every challenging season that follows.

Continue the Conversation

If you’d like to hear Mike Bundy and other leaders share their insights, and explore another real-life model of what’s possible, please join fellow c-suite leaders for the Enduring Excellence small group seminar at University of Virginia Health this October 28-29 .