Healthcare 360: Implementing Creativity in Healthcare

Podcast: Implementing Creativity in Healthcare

On this week’s special episode of Healthcare 360, Yael K. Heher, MD, MPH, FRCP(C), Chief Quality Officer for Beth Israel Lahey Health, sits down with Dr. Rob Fields to discuss implementing creativity in a time of struggle in healthcare.

Navigating the Way

The healthcare industry is facing a wide range of challenges affecting hospitals and health systems locally and nationwide. Its impact on patients is evident in longer wait times in emergency departments and limited access to primary care providers and specialists. Rob Fields, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) explains, “It happens because the fundamentals of the business of medicine are challenged in a significant way both on revenue and cost. It’s a little difficult to find the path these days in the normal models of care to span that chasm between business and public good. It’s becoming more and more difficult and challenging as we’re seeing across the country with hospital closures.”

Issues such as reimbursement, an aging population and escalating costs are forcing healthcare institutions to think about their missions and how best to achieve them while trying to survive. Fields says he and leaders are looking at “how we’re managing that here at Beth Israel Lahey Health and how we are remaining optimistic about the future. What do we need to do to rethink the way we deliver care and the way we collaborate and the way we operate?”

“How do you adjust your behavior accordingly to adjust to the new lifestyle?” he continues. “It’s one thing if you’re one person or one family but now you’re talking about institutions of tens of thousands of employees that all have to change and understand” and he believes healthcare leaders need to identify where a hospital’s mission and sustainability are in confluence.

Discovering New Capabilities

Resolving some of healthcare’s current issues, Fields notes, “requires new capabilities” and reinventing ourselves with new models of care.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is an example of one of these new capabilities. BILH’s Hospital at Home program is growing and allowing patients to provide vital signs, such as blood pressure, pulse and oxygen levels remotely into a centralized environment with clinicians responding in real time. It creates a new and different infrastructure, which Fields says, “takes us out of that brick and mortar, appointment-based model to provide more population level care.”

Fields mentions programs like this try to marry the sustainability piece with the differentiated patient experience and admits it’s ok to talk about sustainability, finances and costs at the same time as long as we lead with the values of “this only works if it works for patients.”

Accepting the Challenge

Fields recognizes that during the pandemic there was a universal and unified sense of urgency. It was during that time there were hundreds of examples of innovative and creative ideas in healthcare systems across the country on how to handle massive demands with a tremendous amount of cooperation. There was a sharing of ideas at a rapid pace he recalls he had never seen in his career.

“I think the challenge for all of us,” he states, “is can we use a time of stress to be innovative and creative about the way we deliver care with the new capabilities we’ve got? And that’s a challenge for all of us I hope we take on.”

Acknowledging there is a lot of work to do, and recognizing the role every BILH employee plays in the patient and family experience, Fields remarks “There’s always an example of someone coming up with a new idea that has real impact. So I have tremendous faith that if we can put together the platform, ask the right questions and engage the right people that someone’s going to come up with the next good idea…Our job is to create the space and to extract that from people because it’s in there.”

Every other week, we'll chat with a leading expert in healthcare to learn about the many challenges and opportunities facing the industry Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Rob Fields here, and check in regularly for new episodes of Healthcare 360.