White Papers

Ben Sawyer MBA, PT, OCS, LBB, executive at ABOUT & co-host of the Baldrige Foundation Leader Dialogue Program

The battering of the healthcare system by the COVID pandemic has caused some healthcare leaders to return to the fundamental question of “why do we exist?” For example, Dr. John Chessare, president and CEO of GBMC HealthCare in Baltimore, Maryland and the 2022 recipient of the Harry S. Hertz Leadership Award, posed that question at the kick-off of the Baldrige Foundation’s Spring 2022 CEO Innovation Council Roundtable. He noted that “in published statements some leaders say that the healthcare system exists to support and develop the health of the community, but if you watch what goes on it is often just the selling of services.” The resulting challenge is that those citizens that most need healthcare, often representing the most disenfranchised and underinsured or uninsured among us, struggle to gain access to the care they need to survive and thrive. Dr. Chessare also notes that “as a leading industrialized nation, the United States has not completed the debate about whether health care is a right or a privilege. It is something we need to address.”

Dr. Roger Spoelman, a co-host of the Baldrige Foundation Leader Dialogue Program, noted that in the wake of the pandemic, access to care became even more challenging as patients were turned away from the hospital due to the influx of COVID patients. According to Dr. Spoelman, “We expected patients to accept our message, and then come back in the same way that we used to treat them. But, no, the market has flipped to consumerism, and is now demonstrating that people will come back on their own terms.” As Diagram 1 from The Health Management Academy below demonstrates, consumers have not been coming back and utilizing services the same as they were before the pandemic.

This leads to the obvious question of “how should health systems respond?” If consumer expectations are changing, and new innovative approaches are required, what is the right strategy and time window in which those strategies should be executed?