Madness to Method: 2018 Fall Forum Wrap Up

It is hard for me to believe that our Fall Forum is now officially in the rearview mirror. Even so, I imagine many of the learnings gained during the 2½ days of networking, general, and breakout session presentations will continue to be relevant to the SMI community for a long time from now. The Forum may be over, but the knowledge sharing has only just begun.

Here are some of the key lessons that I took away from the Forum:

Start with the Consumer

Both Dr. Li Ern Chen and Paul Keckley pointed out the huge knowledge gap consumers have in relation to our overall healthcare system. Most consumers have limited understanding of how insurance works, what’s covered, what out of pocket costs they will be responsible for, and almost no understanding of the convoluted administrative and financial mechanisms that underpin the entire system of incentives.

This lack of understanding is not simply a case of user ignorance but signals deep-rooted flaws in the system itself. It should not require a full-time job and a team of analysts to become knowledgeable on the workings of healthcare. So perhaps instead of looking at this knowledge gap as a time to instruct, we should see it as a time to listen?

To illustrate, Dr. Chen shared a simple equation to define value in healthcare: Outcomes that matter to patients divided by cost per patient. What does the patient care about? And what is the cost to the system to meet this patient need? It shouldn’t matter if we are meeting any internally driven performance metrics if we are not in the end delivering what matters most to the patient.

Not every patient is the same, of course. What matters to you, may not matter much to me. Jamey Shiels highlighted how Advocate Aurora Health has created five segments of patients and are developing services and solutions to meet the unique characteristics of these patient segments. Aligning supply chain services to these unique patient segments should be the next step for any forward-looking supply chain strategy.

Personalize the Supply Chain

One of my favorite moments of the Forum was when Professor Randy Bradley invited Janie Cornelius on stage to discuss her thoughts on using the Domino’s Pizza app called the Pizza Tracker. This moment highlighted how digital can dramatically improve the customer experience, so much so that even if someone enjoys another restaurant’s product better, she is willing to order from Domino’s for the personalized experienced created through the app.

What Domino’s has done is connect users of the app to Domino’s supply chain in a way that turns the simple act of ordering dinner into a more end to end experience. Ironically, while robotics and automation play a role in the fulfillment of the order, the experience is much more "human" for the person using the app.

How transformative could this be for healthcare, particularly as standardization becomes more and more foundational to health system business practice? A patient may not understand anything related to product selection, but they certainly can understand when an experience has been customized for them.

I think in some ways this is why the Zipline International presentation was so engaging to the SMI community. You see near instantaneous fulfillment of life saving blood product directly to point of use. This is a supply chain focused on what matters to the patient.

The Power of Presence through Change

To close, Tamara Sniffen of Stryker gave an inspirational presentation on the way mindfulness practice has helped Stryker focus on developing a more diverse workforce. Her message was absolutely spot on for an industry that struggles with change, and often fails to see the everyday differently. We all have biases, but if we want to create the future health system out of what matters most to patients we will need to overcome the limits set by these biases.

That’s all for now. To paraphrase the great Bill Belichick: We are on to Charlotte.

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