I’ll start with some shameless self-promotion since it’s been a while since I wrote a blog post! I recently became the Director of Innovation at The Wilshire Group. My first objective has been figuring out exactly what that will mean for me in this role and TWG in general. Of course, that isn’t an easy answer and depending on who you ask; innovation can mean a lot of things. For our customers, we innovate all the time as we help you with your latest project or process improvement initiative. For The Wilshire Group, we need to be agile enough to handle anything that comes our way while still creating repeatable projects and toolsets. As you can probably guess, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.
As part of my research into what innovation and technology could mean for healthcare and TWG, I came across this Becker’s Article where a few CIOs weighed in on what they think will be needed. I found the responses very interesting and quite varied, and it just echoed the idea that innovation means a lot of things to a lot of people and what’s important is creating a culture that embraces an innovative mindset. Maybe that’s where I’ll start.
3 Steps Towards Innovation
The article did have a few interesting ideas so I wanted to think about what that would mean for me. Of course, I’m not a CIO at a healthcare system (yet!) but there are plenty of parallels and things we deal with frequently at The Wilshire Group.
#1 – Building a Learning HealthCare System
The point here is although there is often sharing between healthcare systems, it tends to stay localized to the common vendors that are shared (Epic was referenced). How do we create a system to share knowledge across all of healthcare to solve the common problems we all face? For you and me, that may mean going to industry conferences like NAHAM to grow our connections or creating programs within our organizations that target the problems with solutions that are vendor agnostic. An interesting challenge to say the least but one I can’t wait to dig into.
#2 – Ease of Use in Technology
Ever since my days at Epic, I’ve thought a lot about this one. We want to make things easier for the clients we partner with. That may mean fewer manual inputs to get a claim out the door or more automation in our scheduling workflows so users have less clicks. Where I see this one manifest itself often is when we are trying to upgrade our many software solutions to get the latest and greatest.
Are we turning on a feature just to check a box and say we did, or are we making someone’s job easier by doing this this project? Designing processes to look closely at usability and value-added work is critical to continuously improving in the right ways and using our limited time the best we can. It’s something always at the top of our minds at TWG and it’s why I’m so excited about our recent partnership with Claim Capital. Staying connected with disruptors like Claim Capital will allow us to make real change and improvements in healthcare.
#3 – Holding Vendors Accountable
I think the quote from the article rings true for many organizations: “We’ve allowed vendors to get away with creating systems difficult for schedulers to use, for physicians and nurses to document in and for a revenue cycle to process claims. It’s time for hospitals to demand better of their vendors.” We couldn’t agree more and it’s another area of focus for The Wilshire Group going forward! If you follow our LinkedIn page, you may remember this from our last retreat. It’s a hint into what we are working on for the future! I can’t wait to partner with Tim on it. Stay tuned for more!
Want to learn more about our plans to innovate at the Wilshire Group? We’d love to chat. Please contact Matt Perron at The Wilshire Group – m.perron@thewilshiregroup.net.
