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Management lessons from the pandemic: Healthcare leaders must become “activators”

As a brand new, first-time CEO, this trial-by-fire experience in leading through a crisis taught me a lot and gave me much to reflect on. Most notably, the responsibility of a healthcare executive (and any leader, for that matter) appears to have fundamentally changed.

Everyone has a personal list of challenges faced and overcome during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the top of mine is navigating the transition to leading a healthcare IT company as a first-time CEO.

On March 4, 2020, I assumed the CEO role at PatientKeeper, a Massachusetts-based EHR optimization software company. Within two weeks of starting the job, HIMSS20 was canceled, much of the economy shut down, fear had gripped the industry, and financial risk was pervasive.

In a completely unexpected twist of fate, among my first actions upon joining the company was to equip our 200-person workforce to work 100% virtually. Our company’s situation certainly was not unique – nearly every organization that could “go virtual” did so – but mine was. After all, I had barely set foot in the office before I was forced to close it.

Just as significantly, we had to respond quickly to conditions our customers – physicians and other healthcare providers across North America – faced as a result of the pandemic.

As a brand new, first-time CEO, this trial-by-fire experience in leading through a crisis taught me a lot and gave me much to reflect on. Most notably, the responsibility of a healthcare executive (and any leader, for that matter) appears to have fundamentally changed. We may have defined ourselves at one time as decision-makers or problem-solvers or communicators or as those that hire and encourage employees. Going forward, I propose that we must, first and foremost, be activators. We must personally act and execute with a sense of urgency and surround ourselves with others that value velocity and are capable of delivering results at ”Covid speed”, even once the pandemic is history. We must reject old norms such as long, bureaucratic and time-consuming presentations, workshops, and layers of approval required to make decisions. We must drive execution and results based on hypotheses motivated by doing what is right for the patients, providers, and other constituents we serve, without necessarily having the full financial and operational analyses blessed, baked, summarized, and socialized. And we must accept rapid transformation as the norm, and the potential for failure that comes with it.

As we continue to fight the pandemic, I am more convinced than ever that the next decade in medicine will be defined by automation. Our industry will be empowered by technology that will activate data and analytics to both improve clinical care and help reduce the administrative burden on healthcare providers — a huge problem that was exacerbated by Covid-19. Physicians, other providers, nurses, and care teams, who have long been forced to accept monolithic electronic health records (EHR) systems and their usability shortcomings, will require and demand a versatile system of experience that delivers immediately relevant clinical information – think of it as “precision HIT” — to enable higher quality outcomes; and that is available 24×7 on clinicians’ mobile devices, regardless of the physical location of the care team. These ideas are not new, yet it will be the organizations that utilize these products and services and respond at ”Covid speed” to the changing needs of the healthcare community that will be the winners in the future.

Now imagine a world where we attack other pressing problems – poverty, mental health, cancer, obesity, gun violence, climate change, and drug addiction, to name a few – with the same speed, resources, and urgency as we are the current Covid-19 pandemic. I can! And I believe the new post-pandemic responsibility of any leader will be to serve as an activator, driving velocity and a sense of urgency as our pre-eminent responsibility.

Photo: z_wei, Getty Images

 


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Philip Meer

Phil Meer was appointed CEO of PatientKeeper in 2020. He brings to PatientKeeper 20 years of experience in customer-facing leadership roles at enterprise software and healthcare IT organizations, and a career-long focus on ensuring customer success and operational excellence.

Meer joined PatientKeeper from Evariant, a leading healthcare consumer and physician engagement company, where he served as Executive Vice President, Customer Experience. Prior to Evariant, he held various business operational leadership roles at Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP).

Meer graduated Summa Cum Laude from Brandeis University and earned his MBA from the New York University Stern School of Business.

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