At TLD Group, we’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to drive success in a continually changing, somewhat chaotic health ecosystem. How can leaders drive innovation and promote wellness when barriers to success come up at every turn?
Through our work with top leaders across the health ecosystem, conducting research, and examining our own data, we’ve gathered predictions for what’s next in the health ecosystem, and how leaders can prepare to meet these challenges.
Trends in the Environment that Necessitate a Leadership Shift
1. Staffing Shortages and Changing Employee Expectations Around Health and Well-being: In 2023, we expect workload and stress to remain high as staffing shortages and retention issues continue. A study on physician burnout found that 62.8% of physicians had at least one symptom of burnout in 2021, compared with 43.9% in 2017, and as providers continue to experience burnout, healthcare organizations will have to consider how to curb these symptoms of work-related stress.
Part of supporting employees will likely be placing specific attention on employees’ physical and mental health.
2. New Players in the Health Ecosystem and Changes in Where Care is Being Delivered: Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) among technology, retail, and other non-traditional healthcare players is causing a critical mass of patients to receive primary and urgent care outside of traditional health systems. Some of the large M&A activity in 2022 included CVS Pharmacy’s acquisition of Signify, a healthcare platform with 10,000 physicians in the United States who provide care virtually and in person, and Amazon’s acquisition of primary care provider OneMedical, which has 188 offices in the U.S.
To maintain critical market share, traditional health systems will have to forge new partnerships and relationships.
3. Shifts in Reimbursement Models Require New Strategies to ’Win’: It’s no secret that the transition from volume to value-based care hasn’t gone smoothly. Changes in reimbursement without coordinated complimentary changes in relationships, processes, and structure, are not enough to bend the curve toward transformation. A challenging aspect of US policy change is that it’s very slow moving. While the passing of the Affordable Care Act was monumental, there are significant learnings that will need to be incorporated, including adjusting policy, to ensure we reap the rewards of its promises.
No matter what, though, change will continue to come from all directions.
What qualities will define a successful leader in the future of healthcare?
Driving innovation, tackling health equity, and promoting wellness at scale within the US requires a radically different set of leadership skills than those we’ve relied on in the past. It’s time to turn our attention to defining the capabilities that leaders will be required to demonstrate and the techniques needed to intentionally develop, recruit, and reward leaders for driving change at scale.
At TLD Group, we believe that no matter what challenge the healthcare industry faces, the most effective strategy for success is well-trained, confident leaders. To answer the question “What will it take, from a leadership perspective, to transform the US healthcare system?” we look to the development of a future-oriented leadership success profile which is a tool to align industry challenges to leadership requirements.
Leadership Success Profiles include a number of building blocks (industry context and job demands) that ultimately define the dimensions of leadership (competencies, experiences, knowledge, and drives) that are required to drive success. When these profiles are leveraged properly, they support a broad range of talent supply chain needs –such as recruitment, assessment, selection, development, succession, and more.
Here’s a preview of the dimensions of leadership our research shows will be required for success.
Knowledge: The technical and professional information required to drive strategic priorities includes a keen understanding of social determinants, the know-how to engage their organization in full-scale cultural transformation, and knowledge of how to systematically structure data and technology. These specific knowledge areas, and others, must come in addition to a thorough understanding of the health ecosystem and the vantage points of the various sectors and their values and challenges.
Competencies: Competencies are behaviors that enable leadership success when demonstrated regularly. In a word, the new leader is radical: radically honest, collaborative, creative, willing to fail and resilient. This new leader must have a sense of fearlessness and be willing to embrace failure as an opportunity to learn in order to ultimately succeed.
Experiences: Successful leaders also have educational and work achievements that help them execute their role accountabilities and overcome challenges in their roles. For the new healthcare leader, it will be important to have experience across multiple sectors so they can view challenges from different perspectives and not be tied to “the way things have always been done.” Healthcare leaders of the future will also benefit from experience in both individual patient care delivery and strategies to manage and support the health of populations.
Drivers: Drivers are personal dispositions and motivators that relate to how an individual derives meaning. For the successful leader in the health ecosystem, this includes wellness, equity, altruism, and a desire to create equal outcomes for every member of a community.
You can see our complete success profile and predictors for 2023 trends in our upcoming EBook and whitepaper. Follow along on our website to stay up to date.
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