CXOs must lead the digital disruption of healthcare, says expert Dr. Art Langer
A host of new challenges are impacting healthcare in all geographies, and digital technology will become essential to managing these demands and meeting the needs of clinicians and patients. Healthcare CXOs must reimagine their roles and operate in new ways to keep healthcare healthy.
The cost of delivering healthcare is rising, as is the average age of people among Western nations. As a result, healthcare organizations have to provide more care longer and with less funding, whether publicly or commercially paid for.
Despite these challenges, the consumers of healthcare are expecting more, especially from digital healthcare. Unsurprisingly, healthcare has been cited as one of the sectors that could be transformed by digitization and AI in order to cut costs, provide preventative measures, and improve diagnosis and treatment pathways.
“The healthcare industry is going through a massive transformation, and we are seeing incredible change, and there is more to come, driven by digital technology,” says Dr. Art Langer, Director of the Center for Technology Management and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University, New York. Like almost every other sector, healthcare is being disrupted by technology and the S curve of change in business.
Traditional thinking has described business growth as an S-shaped curve where the lower end of the S represents high demand and low supply fostering that demand, which is also the time when a new business or service is at the highest risk.
The bottom end of the curve is when organizations can seize the greatest market share. As an organization succeeds, it reaches the middle of the S curve, which is typically where supply and demand are equal, there is competition in the market, and the product or service is no longer an innovation but a commodity.
“The revolution is similar to the industrial revolution, but the difference is the shortening of the S curve,” Dr. Langer says. “It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, television 13 years, the internet four years, Twitter, now called X, nine months, and Pokémon Go just 14 days.”
“As you can see, it is not just the technology being created,” Dr. Langer adds. “It is the ability to reach people that are shrinking the S curve.” Dr. Langer, a former CIO and now leading academic, acknowledges that the same trend is beginning to reshape healthcare.
However, this poses a challenge for healthcare and its CXOs. “The social, economic and legal systems do not move quickly,” says Dr. Langer. “They are incremental, so they are falling behind every day.”
Necessary change
With so much change reshaping healthcare, technology leadership in health has to change. “Do you want to be disrupted or the disruptor?” Dr. Langer asks. The experiences that consumers have outside of healthcare are influencing the experience consumers expect when dealing with the sector.
“Every consumer wants a personalized relationship,” says Dr. Langer. “As soon as you get a smartphone, you personalize it.” To offer a personalized digital experience to consumers and clinicians, CXOs need to address how technology moves from a support operation to a strategic leader and utilizes AI and guarantees cybersecurity for the organization.
The organization will also need to change. “You must be in a firm that is willing to support digital disruption,” Dr. Langer says. He adds that every level of the organization has to understand and be part of digitally disrupting itself in order to meet new demands. This will involve rethinking entrenched processes such as finance.
“If the company is driven by budgets, then it will struggle,” he says. Dr. Langer advises CXOs to read the book Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, which argues that planning is no longer useful.
Returning to what this means to budgeting for the digital transformation of healthcare, Dr. Langer says “You have to have a dynamic budget, which is a living budget that is open to sudden and potential trends and gets the business into the S curve.”
As part of this remodeling of a healthcare organization, technology leaders need to move into a position where they are considered providers of strategic advantage. To achieve this, technology CXOs must remain close to the organization’s customers. This will require a decreased focus on technology and an increased focus on data.
“In the healthcare business, your only asset is the data,” Dr. Langer notes. “As a technology leader, you have the data and you are responsible for the data, so use it to formulate strategies.”
As the organization increasingly uses technology and data, Dr. Langer predicts that cross-functional teams will have technologists in every department and that the CIO is the “spiritual leader that works with executives to show how they can use technology to improve the top and bottom line of the organization.”
He admits this will be a challenge. “Most of us were brought up where users told us what to do and we delivered. We have to continue to do that, but now we also have to understand what the consumer wants, and you need to be on the board as a guiding light.”
“You have to learn to grow in an ever-changing economy,” he adds. “If you are planning, then your plans will never come to fruition. You have to be accelerating life, making the job ever more dynamic.”
A lot of technology innovation succeeded, but not in the way first thought,” he says, adding that it was unlikely that Steve Jobs foresaw that the iPad would be ideal for CEOs, as an example. Following this path, Dr. Langer says, will lead to technology CXOs becoming central to the creation of a culture in the organization that is responsive and integrated.
Drilling down into the IT department, he says this will require “continuous improvement practices where systems are retired, and you are creating a vision for a dynamic internal process that can be easily shifted if the market shifts or there is a black swan event.
“Covid was an example of a black swan event, and the digital companies were able to adjust and deliver,” says Dr. Langer. “That is why they succeeded.”
Healthcare, like those sectors adjacent to it, is undergoing a major digital transformation. CXOs are well placed to lead that transition, but they need to understand that they must be both a business support and business change leader.
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