The Ingenuity Rally: Health Care at the Door of Something Big

June 9, 2020  |  Mike Eaton

Healthcare

Innovation is about creating something new. Ingenuity is innovation with a purpose—in health care, that being to help people live longer, better lives.

Ingenuity is about a relentless search for unmet needs and people’s cravings. It’s about finding new ways to solve for those unmet needs.  The companies that do it well can adapt to any disruptive situation and not only survive but emerge stronger. The companies that do not have the ingenuity DNA litter the annals of discarded brands and business models.

The most recent proof of this point can be found in the U.S. stock market. In the midst of a pandemic, with some companies experiencing a near bottoming-out of their share prices, a handful of companies are soaring to new heights. Companies like Home Depot, Chipotle, Dollar General, Logitech and even Sam Adams Beer posted record high stock prices mid-May because they have re-engineered their service and distribution models on the fly or tapped into amplified demand in the middle of a time when people were not leaving their homes.

Hospitals and physicians, too, are applying ingenuity to solve for seemingly unresolvable problems to keep caring for people even with offices shuttered and procedural rooms and surgical suites closed. Virtual care is the most obvious innovation, but so, too, providers have figured out new tools to engage people for chronic care management through applications, to address mental health issues with mindfulness tools, and to shift care to unconventional sites that offer a safe haven from the coronavirus.

While most of these innovators are nonprofits without a share price to gauge the immediate impact of their ingenuity, you can expect that those that continue to push the pace of applied innovation to remove cost, complexity and time from care experiences will see strong market growth post-pandemic. Consumers have seen that as an industry we can short-circuit the bureaucracy of delivering care, medicine and support services when we must. They will want to see that rapid pace of performance improvement continue post-peak pandemic.

Are you among the ingenious systems that have the agility, the imagination and courage to change? If you’re not sure, ask your team this question:

If tomorrow we were told that going forward our in-person capacity in physician offices and inpatient acute care hospitals was to be capped at 50% of current levels, what would we do first and then forever moving forward to keep delivering on our mission?

BVK Health has invested time into thinking through these opportunities for ingenuity in health care and can help facilitate a provocative and productive conversation around your network leadership table. To learn more, download our new e-book, Fractured, and join us for one of our Fractured Webinars we will be hosting. Click on a date option below to register:

• June 16^th @ 12:00 p.m. CDT
• June 23^rd @ 12:00 p.m. CDT
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• July 14th @ 12:00 p.m. CDT