Research and Training on Healthcare Analytics & Leadership
“It is more important for leaders to admit that you don’t know something and then commit to learning, rather than telling people what they want to hear.”
– John Couris, President and CEO of Tampa General Hospital
From the book, “The Path to Elite Level Leadership.”
I’m looking to participating in this panel discussion on September 29th for #aimed. There are no #AI shortcuts to #aihealthcare. Like anything else, you have to build a solid foundation to be successful. I discuss many of these concepts in my book Competing on Healthcare Analytics and in my analytics classes at Northwestern University School of Professional Studies.
An insight into predictive analytics that is the basis for real-time or near real-time decision support that is still rare among healthcare organisations.
Healthcare analytics has the potential to help identify possible health risks, promote better health and deliver more accurate diagnosis and treatment plans. There are several challenges that must be overcome before healthcare can deliver on that promise.
With the rate of change occurring in healthcare, today’s leaders must be well-versed in all aspects of the practice of leadership. Previous studies undertaken by the Healthcare Center of Excellence (HCOE) have indicated that leadership is the top challenge to many aspects of healthcare transformation. Managing this changing environment will require leaders to elevate their staff and organization to navigate the new maze that is healthcare. The rate of change and expectations will only expose any leadership deficiencies.
Scott Becker interviews Bryan Bennett, Executive Director at Healthcare Center of Excellence and Author of “Prescribing Leadership in Healthcare” for his Leaders in Healthcare Podcast series.
The one-size-fits-all approach to leadership development offered by other programs doesn’t consider an individual’s personality and capabilities. You can’t learn ‘skill x’ one day and expect to be a better leader the next. True leadership growth requires ongoing development and feedback.
In the 1999 groundbreaking movie, “The Matrix”, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) a choice between a blue pill and a red pill. If Neo took the blue pill, he would wake up and continue believing whatever he wanted to believe about his life. If he took the red pill, he would stay and learn the truth about the Matrix.
This is your “Matrix” moment. It’s time for you to make a choice to either continue believing what you’ve been told about leadership or continue reading to learn some myths and truths about leadership.
Good leadership in healthcare is critical to the success of the industry’s transformation, but it’s the subject few want to discuss. We are fooling ourselves if we believe that technology and data alone will solve the challenges currently facing our healthcare system. The industry is undergoing a significant change and any change management program indicates that executive sponsorship or leadership is a critical success factor. Yet, when I speak at conferences around the world, leadership is the number one topic I receive follow up comments about. The presentation could be on healthcare transformation, population health, precision medicine or healthcare analytics – none of which can be implemented without good leadership. I could spend 5 minutes or 50 minutes on leadership, and have consistently found that leadership is the area people want to comment on the most. It’s the subject no one wants to talk about, but everyone wants to hear about.
We are facing a leadership crisis which impacts all aspects of our lives. It affects us in healthcare, government, business, education and in the church. Lack of leadership is shown when a person in a leadership position puts their own needs or personal agenda ahead of those they are charged to lead. Just because someone is in a leadership position does not make them a leader. You can be in a leadership position (supervisor, manager, director, executive, etc.) and not have any leadership abilities. This is called Positional Leadership and occurs when someone has some position of authority but is not practicing any form of leadership. These people are not usually very effective at what they do and only accomplish what they do because of their authority. They were probably promoted to their position because they did their job well at a lower level, but little evaluation was given to their potential for leadership. The better word to describe them is manager, not leader. We have all known people who fall into this category and, unfortunately, many of us may have worked for them.
I was invited to speak at Oxford Global’s inaugural Precision Medicine Congress, April 25 and 26 in London, England. My topic, “Big Data Analytics for Precision Medicine”, stood out from the other presentations, as intended, since I was one of few non-clinicians or genomics scientists invited to speak at the Congress but believe that as I professor and data scientist I was able to hold my own. As an added bonus, I had to pleasure to meet a ‘Sir’ and a ‘Dame’, which are knighthood titles bestowed on extraordinary subjects, in recognition of their great achievement or outstanding service to the United Kingdom. Both worked in the healthcare industry either in the public or private sectors.