Monthly Archives: July 2023

Leadership and crisis management lessons from Pennsylvania

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I love seeing stories of success with lessons to apply to our work in health IT. The recent I-95 collapse in Philadelphia and the re-opening in just 12 days is one of those stories. There was a great opinion piece in the Washington Post on July 16th by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro – “Opinion: We fixed I-95 in 12 days. Here are our lessons for U.S. infrastructure”. Initially experts told the Governor it would be months before they could reopen the highway and get traffic flowing. Instead, they reopened it in just 12 days. Indeed, there are many lessons for leaders in all industries.

Here are the four key takeaways he comments on:

  1. Empower strong leadership
  2. Speed up the bureaucracy
  3. Encourage creativity
  4. Work together

In the face of a crisis, empowering strong leadership is critical. We’ve seen it in healthcare during the pandemic and when responding to any kind of disaster. As Governor Shapiro describes it – “Managers of every component of the project were empowered to be decisive, take ownership and make a call when necessary — not defer and delay to the often-circular bureaucracy. Decisions were made quickly and in a synchronized manner.”

We have plenty of bureaucracy in healthcare including many processes in IT that seem burdensome. Governor Shapiro described how an executive order he signed shortly after taking office that catalogued each of the 2,400 permits, certificates and licenses the state issues and set timelines for each of them resulted in significantly reducing wait times – with one example cutting the time from eight weeks to two days. IT leaders take note – how many processes can be streamlined in your shop?

Innovation in healthcare is greatly needed and there are many bright spots we read about each day. But innovation is not just the new big flashy stuff, it can be a creative and new way to solve a problem that comes from someone on the team or an observer. Governor Shapiro wrote, “Encourage creativity and allow everyone to bring their ideas forward”. The backfill solution to rebuild the collapsed freeway using a recycled glass product was a result of that creativity from PennDOT engineers.

We all know there is no “I” in team. We accomplish great things by working together. In Pennsylvania, state and federal officials coordinated closely with each other and private contractors and organized labor collaborated working 24/7 to get the job done.

While we never want a crisis to manage through, there will be more. These lessons will be key then and every day.

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Lessons from Succession: What not to do as a leader

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I recently wrote a blog post called “Ted Lasso leadership lessons”. If you were a fan of the Ted Lasso series, you can readily see there were many lessons to be learned. Another popular series, Succession, wrapped up around the same time. I wasn’t sure how I could comment on leadership lessons from that series as there didn’t seem to be any characters that you would want to model. But there were plenty of lessons on what not to do as a leader.

Others have figured out what to say about Succession leadership lessons, so I’ll share the insights from one of them. A Forbes article on June 26th by Robert Pearl, MD, titled “5 Fatal Flaws Of Healthcare Leaders: Inspired By HBO’s ‘Succession’” describes five dysfunctional leadership styles to avoid based on some of the lead characters. In his words:

  1. Delusional leaders overestimate their abilities. Their ideas are unrealistic and their vision for the future: pure fiction.
  2. Narcissistic leaders bask in praise and blind loyalty. They reject and punish those who provide honest feedback and fair criticism. Their obsession with status and self-importance blinds them to long-term threats and opportunities, alike.
  3. Immature leaders get promoted before they’re primed and polished. They often lack boundaries and excel at the sport of making others uncomfortable.
  4. Political leaders are better at advancing within an organization than advancing the organization itself. Like chameleons, these leaders change with the scenery, shifting alliances and values as organizational power waxes and wanes.
  5. Compromised leaders are skilled at making promises. They seek support by vowing to fulfill wants and palliate pains.

Dr. Pearl closes the article highlighting three attributes that excellent healthcare leaders must have:

  1. Clear mission and purpose
  2. Experience and expertise
  3. Personal integrity

The third, personal integrity, is particularly critical. As Dr. Pearl says, “Everything changes when an emerging leader becomes the head of an organization and faces a crisis. As risks and pressures intensify, people tend to fall back on approaches and habits they learned in the past, particularly problematic ones.” Without being a spoiler, anyone who watched Succession can see how easily the emerging leaders fell back to their own demise.

I encourage you to read the full article but must warn you with a spoiler alert – if you haven’t seen the show but plan to watch it given all the buzz, bookmark the article to read later.  What buzz you ask? The fourth and final season just received 27 Emmy nominations with a total of 75 nominations over all the seasons.

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Ted Lasso leadership lessons

Divided opinions on AI in healthcare

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Are you and your doctor ready for AI? While patients may be getting more comfortable with AI, how healthcare professionals embrace AI is critical to its evolution and eventual use.

Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School conducted a poll in May among 3,317 adults age 18 and over in the U.S. and included a sample of 357 healthcare workers who were asked about how AI is already affecting their jobs, and how it might continue to do so in the future.

So how comfortable are healthcare professionals with AI? According to the study, “Healthcare professionals are somewhat divided in their opinions of AI: 23% think the use of AI in healthcare will help more than it hurts, 33% think it will hurt more than it helps, and 42% think it will equally help and hurt.”

Another interesting but not surprising poll result is the age differentiation. According to the study, “Younger adults express more comfort with AI-led healthcare, with 40% of those 18-34 saying they would be comfortable with a primary care appointment led by AI, vs. just 24% among those 65 and older.”

A Becker’s story, published June 29 by Giles Bruce, “Where Americans want and don’t want AI in healthcare: 7 things to know”, provides the following highlights from the study:

    1. Two-thirds of Americans believe AI will play a bigger role in healthcare five years from now.
    2. 34 percent expect AI to be better than healthcare providers at treating patients without bias.
    3. 1 in 4 are comfortable with AI-led therapy.
    4. 22 percent expect AI to be better than medical professionals at diagnosing conditions.
    5. 12 percent said their healthcare providers currently use AI to augment treatment, diagnosis or communication.
    6. 83 percent of medical professionals don’t currently use AI.
    7. A third of healthcare providers say AI will do more harm than good.

AI is already being used in many ways in healthcare and will continue to evolve. IT leaders need to stay current as it evolves, leverage their existing vendor partners, carefully assess the new niche players and their claims, develop AI skills within their teams, partner with clinical and operational leaders to find ways to experiment that make the most sense for their organization, and learn from other organizations who are more advanced users of AI.

Bill Russell’s This Week Health podcasts often cover AI so it’s a great resource for keeping up and hearing what the issues are and how it is being used in different organizations. One of the newest episodes is TownHall: The Potential and Unknowns of AI and Emerging Tech in Healthcare, Part 1, a conversation between Dr. Brett Oliver, Family Physician and Chief Medical Information Officer at Baptist Health and John League, Managing Director, Digital Health Research at Advisory Board.

As my favorite television news anchor likes to say, “watch this space”.

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