In this episode

Sonia Singh is the Chief Insights Officer at AVIA and the author of the report Radical Reinvention: Future Proofing Your Health System. Singh discusses three large trends that she feels have made healthcare delivery unsustainable for health systems:

• A looming supply-and-demand problem as the healthcare workforce shrinks and the American population continues to advance in average age.
• An erosion of the core healthcare business model, where health systems can’t cut costs enough to improve bottom line.
• An accelerating pace of change in healthcare.

Singh discusses these trends and how they necessitate a total reinvention of our approach to healthcare delivery in this episode.

“The status quo is crumbling, and the question is, do traditional tactics still apply? The answer really for most cases is no.”

– Sonia Singh

 

Key takeaways

Singh discussed the highlights of her research and recent report, Radical Reinvention: Future Proofing Your Health System. She went beyond year-to-year trends to outline major “macro” shifts in the healthcare industry — arguing that we are now approaching an inflection point for these large-scale shifts that demands a different approach.

She heavily emphasized the intersection of the workforce and technology as a place for radical reinvention that can help healthcare evolve beyond these trends.

The three large-scale trends she outlined that demand changes in workforce and technology are:

Trend #1: Shrinking workforce, growing demand for healthcare resources

“We will not have enough workforce clinical workforce to sustain, and provide healthcare for, all the upcoming healthcare needs. And you couple that with an aging population that is aging faster than ever before, with increasing chronic diseases, and the equation doesn’t make sense anymore,” Singh said. “It’s not about hiring more people…you have to think about it differently.”

She said that we need to evaluate “care delivery transformation,” including:

• How will care be delivered in different ways?
• How will the workforce change?
• How will physical operations and spaces change?

Trend #2: Cutting costs is no longer cutting it

“With inflation, with increasing administrative costs, and you can’t really play with pricing that much anymore,” Singh says, simply reducing costs is not a sustainable way to drive revenue.

“Going back to the root problem of the workforce challenge and the shortage that we’re seeing…We just won’t be able to replenish fast enough. So we have to think about how do we do more with less. but that requires that our staff are able to interact with technology in new ways and be able to deliver care in new ways.”

Singh acknowledges that truly reinventing care delivery and the healthcare workforce using technology isn’t a simple fix, but a total paradigm shift.

“That requires a level of understanding of how technology and digital will work, understanding the limitations of it, understanding the ethical implications of it,” Singh said.
”And that doesn’t just happen with a class on ChatGPT. That requires a very involved, in-depth training for all the staff: How do you adopt this? How does this change your workflow? How does it change your mindset? How does it change how you interact with patients? How does it change how you interact with your colleagues?”

Trend #3: Accelerating pace of change

In addition to technology rapidly changing around us, Singh said, “couple that with medical knowledge advancing faster than ever before, and I think it’s leading to this point where we have to upscale workforce at all levels.”

She argued that this accelerating pace of change makes changes in staffing and the role of technology even more critical, but noted that technology can also help staff experience more fulfillment in their daily tasks. “Whatever we can do to make life easier for the the staff that we have and the clinicians that we have is critical,” she said.