Risk Tolerance
This week, the former CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, said something about the healthcare industry that really resonated with me. He asserted that the healthcare industry needs to develop a higher tolerance of risk. This assertion followed a story from Marc Randolph about the early days of Netflix when he and Reed Hastings offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million. The deal was rejected. It was too risky for Blockbuster, despite the fact that we now know: This was the one deal that could have saved Blockbuster.
Dr. Cosgrove attributed healthcare’s risk aversion to medical training that teaches that it's a virtue to “be repetitive and maintain the status quo”.
As a healthcare CIO, this narrative really resonated. Are my colleagues and I, as CIO’s, part of the status quo or are we doing our part to move the industry forward? Because if the status quo was working, healthcare wouldn’t be a top issue on voters’ minds, and the U.S. wouldn’t be spending nearly 20% of its GDP on healthcare while getting inferior outcomes compared to the rest of the developed world.
When I look around at the industry, I see many technology leaders and their vendors waiting until someone else has a success that they can copy instead of doing the work of leading through “validated learning”. Other industries are doing careful consideration of new ideas, diligent risk management, responsible pilots, and finally becoming early adopters of new technology that gives an edge to them and their customers. But in healthcare, I fear that many of us have become too complacent with sitting back and waiting for wide adoption before adopting anything ourselves. But there are safe ways to innovate, even in an industry as delicate as healthcare.
Has “You go first” become the healthcare CIO mantra? I hope not. I won’t let it become mine.
Planning, Operations & Medical Intelligence Officer | 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU)
6 年Dave you make some great points. Surprisingly enough, prior to reading your post, I had the opportunity to listen to Chris Donovan, Executive Director of Enterprise Analytics at the Cleveland Clinic give a presentation at the Maryland HIMSS chapter meeting tonight at AAMC that echoed a similar mindset. He discussed the concept of mitigating risk by being cognitive of the gaps between production and consumption of healthcare IT and data analytics in a healthcare organization. An organization can only create or introduce (produce) technology that it is able to be effectively and efficiently utilized (consumed) throughout the organization. If it brings in or (produces) technology that cannot be effectively or efficiently used (consumed) by the organization than that ends up becoming waste. It is up to the CIOs and Health IT leaders to help the organization bridge the gap between production and consumption of technology in order to increase utilization which translates into benefits for the organization and the patient. Using technology to drive analytics in order to mitigate risk and decrease the gap between what is available and what the organization can effectively use is the key to pushing the limits and being cutting edge.
Bringing the Predictive Power of Data to Healthcare
6 年Very well said Dave.
Founder | Principal Consultant | Epic Bridges / AppOrchard / Data Courier | Meditech NMI | Cloverleaf | Ensemble / Health Connect / Iris | Summit Exchange | Rhapsody / Corepoint | eGate | HL7 | FHIR | API
6 年Great Article!!