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The Evolved Healthcare Enterprise: An Intro to the Three Archetypes

Are you a transformer, an invader or creator? The answer can change your growth trajectory.

Recently, it was announced that Amazon will start marketing PillPack pharmacy services to Prime members, and healthcare is watching. Today’s digitally-native organizations are inherently more agile than their decades-old competitors. Companies that think about digital differently are focused on driving growth – not just implementing the latest technology.

Evolved Enterprises: Driving Uncommon Growth

Prophet characterizes these companies as evolved enterprises because they are committed to three fundamentals of our digital age to drive uncommon growth.  These companies are:

  • Customer experience-centric: No matter who their customers are, these companies understand they are in the business of experience and they design their business models explicitly to compete on experience and innovation.
  • Building exceptional brands: Because digital businesses are interactive by definition, customers must have positive associations with your brand, which requires a radically reimagined marketing machine.
  • Mastering demand-generating capabilities: From aligning and deploying the salesforce to be more effective, to designing and curating martech stacks that are relevant and timely, these organizations know how to be efficient and effective with customer interactions.
  • Unleashing the talent of their people: Empowered, autonomous teams at the help organizations operate at the speed of digital. They are fast, flexible and responsive. When grounded in a shared purpose, this freedom unleashes innovation, engages employees and attracts critical talent.

These characteristics have proven to hold true across industries, including healthcare. Many healthcare executives would argue that they are not only true, but most traditional healthcare organizations are lagging behind. Historically, this is largely because healthcare organizations have had a somewhat captured market.

When they were founded, operations were frequently the sole challenge. Whether it was labor-management of a health system, manufacturing and distributing products, underwriting a diverse portfolio of insurance plans, etc., simply getting the work done, was the key challenge. There was a need to be product or service-focused. Digital has changed that, and winning organizations today are customer experience focused (not just customer-focused).

The Three Main Archetypes of Healthcare Consumer-Centricity

In my colleagues Jeff Gourdji and Scott Davis’s latest book, Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity, we see a number of organizations showing promise on their transformation journey. These “transformers” are one archetype of the evolved healthcare enterprises. In the following blog series, we’ll explore the following archetypes of Evolved Healthcare Enterprises that are emerging across the healthcare ecosystem:

Transformers

As mentioned above, these are traditional healthcare organizations seeking to transform and adopt traits of modern Evolved Healthcare Enterprises. These are often companies that fit nicely in the payer, provider, and life sciences sectors Geisinger Health is a great example of a transformer. The Geisinger Medical Center was founded over 100 years ago, as your typical hospital. However, it’s experience-first initiatives such as money-back guarantees and other innovative consumer, clinical, and cost approaches make it an evolved healthcare enterprise in the transformer category.

Creators

These are organizations that start as evolved healthcare enterprises, typically in the last 20 years and are digitally native, and synonymous with start-ups. They sometimes fit within traditional healthcare categories, such as the health insurer, Oscar. Frequently they are creating new sub-categories such as Patients Like Me that provide patient peer groups, helping support each other as well as sharing and discussing a variety of treatment methods that aid in research. Or Exact Sciences and their product Cologuard brings lab testing into the convenience of people’s homes.

Invaders

These are proven evolved enterprises outside of the healthcare industry that are moving in, often grabbing headlines such as Amazon, Apple, and Google. And with good reason, Apple Health Records and its ability to enable more portability of patient medical records is helping to break down EMR silos as patients move through the larger healthcare system. Amazon is now making bonafide medical devices that are HIPAA-compliant. Their “invasion” is quite real and is gaining more momentum every day.

“Companies that think about digital differently are focused on driving growth – not just implementing the latest technology.”

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FINAL THOUGHTS

In the subsequent parts of this series, we will dive deeper into each of these archetypes. We will highlight the inherent strengths  as well as the disadvantages of each archetype. Regardless of whether you’re a transformer, creator, invader, or none of the above, this series will underscore the amount of change we’re seeing in healthcare today as well as the opportunity the healthcare industry has to unlock growth by by embracing the digital age. Change is here, and it’s coming from everywhere.

Learn more about the ever-changing aspects of impactful healthcare customer experiences.

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Healthcare Transformation: How Do We Get There?

On the Healthcare Rap podcast, Jeff Gourdji, co-author of the new book Making the Healthcare Shift, breaks down the 5 necessary shifts for becoming consumer-centric, and how marketing and technology are involved. All that, plus an inside look at launching his book and a shout-out to little moments that make a big difference.

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Influence Podcast: Making the Healthcare Shift

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Key Elements of a Next-Generation Digital Marketing Strategy

Get new insights into demand generation, driving digital commerce and optimizing customer experience.

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Six Drivers of Digital Marketing Success

Digital marketing has come a long way from simply putting banner ads on the internet. It has evolved from mass messaging to personalized messaging, and finally to integrated communications in blended physical and digital environments.

In addition to the traditional goals of creating awareness about the brand, marketers can now choose from a new range of goals, ranging from demand generation, driving digital commerce, and optimizing the customer experience of products and services.

In order to deliver on these new goals, marketers need a next-gen digital marketing strategy, one that goes beyond the scope of what marketers could traditionally achieve and harnesses the power and complexity of today’s marketing technology and data platforms.

This report defines the key characteristics of a next-gen strategy, and identifies 6 drivers of its successful implementation to help you evaluate your team’s readiness for the next phase of its digital evolution.

In this report, you will learn:

  • What defines a ‘next-gen’ digital marketing strategy
  • What key factors drive success in this new marketing paradigm
  • How to prioritize the use cases and technologies that are most important to your marketing organization

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The State of Digital Transformation 2019

Most transformation efforts continue to focus on modernizing customer touchpoints and enabling infrastructure.

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Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority — but there’s work to be done

Now in its fifth year, our annual “State of Digital Transformation” research continues to document the constantly evolving enterprise. As disruptive technologies and their impact on organizations and markets continue to progress, our research aims to capture the shifts and trends that are shaping modern digital transformation.

In 2019, strategic digital transformation is only becoming more pervasive moving beyond IT to impact competitiveness throughout the organization. Budgets are soaring. The list of disruptive technologies on the radar of stakeholders is expanding. Ownership is moving to the C-Suite and managed by cross-functional, collaborative groups. Customer experience (CX) continues to lead digital transformation investments, but as we observed in 2017, employee experience and organizational culture are also rising in importance to empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.

Digital Transformation as an Enterprise-Wide Movement

This year, it’s clear that digital transformation is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement. Digital transformation is modernizing how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy.

What’s also evident is that there is still much work to do as companies are, by and large, prioritizing technology over grasping the disruptive trends that are influencing markets and, more specifically, customer and employee behaviors and expectations.

The State of Digital Transformation: 5 Key Takeaways

  • A successful digital transformation is an enterprise-wide effort that is best served by a leader with broad organizational purview. For the second year in a row, CIOs are reported as most often owning or sponsoring digital transformation initiatives (28%), with CEOs increasingly playing a leadership role (23%).
  • Market pressures are the leading drivers of digital transformation as most efforts are spurred by growth opportunities (51%) and increased competitive pressure (41%). With high-profile data breach scandals making daily headlines, new regulatory standards like GDPR are also providing impetus for organizations to transform (38%).
  • While there is a growing acknowledgment of the importance of human factors in digital transformation – like employee experience and organizational culture – most transformation efforts continue to focus on modernizing customer touchpoints (54%) and enabling infrastructure (45%). But many organizations are not doing their due diligence when it comes to understanding their customers, with 41% of companies making investments in digital transformation without the guidance of thorough customer research.
  • Organizational buy-in remains a top challenge for those leading digital transformation. The companies we studied report digital transformation is still often perceived as a cost center (28%), and data to prove ROI is hard to come by (29%). Cultural issues also pose notable difficulty, with entrenched viewpoints, resistance to change (26%), and legal and compliance concerns (26%) stymieing progress.
  • Innovation is staking its claim within the organization. Nearly half of respondents report that they are building a culture of innovation, with in-house innovation teams becoming the norm.

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BOOK

Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity

SCOTT DAVIS, JEFF GOURDJI

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Summary

As the industry sits on the edge of disruption, healthcare organizations need to transform to stay relevant.

Healthcare organizations now have both the motive and means to empower, engage, equip and enable consumers. While healthcare organizations have recognized the need to change, they have struggled to get started and sustain the effort. Based on conversations with leading healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Geisinger, Anthem, Aetna, Pfizer, Novartis and more, the book identifies five required shifts organizations can make to better compete in this evolving landscape.

Through case studies and practical examples, Making the Healthcare Shift provides healthcare leaders across the healthcare ecosystem with a playbook to make their organizations more consumer-centric.

“Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play or wherever books are sold.

Highlights

  • Identifies the five shifts healthcare companies need to make to become more consumer-centric.
  • Offers case studies and practical advice on how to make these five shifts become a reality.
  • Reveals how traditional healthcare organizations (payers, providers, pharma companies) can prepare for the changes to come and re-invent how they engage with consumers.
  • Provides practical advice for healthcare leaders across the globe who have the fortitude to transform their organizations to both compete and win in the age of healthcare consumerism.

Endorsements

Andrew Dreyfus
Chief Executive Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts

“The time has come to put the consumer at the center of everything. Scott and Jeff offer a guide to that important change. It’s grounded in consumer relationships that are built on partnership and collaboration”

Kevin Kumler
President of Health Systems, Zocdoc

“Our partners are getting more than the technology we provide – we help healthcare organizations become more digital and agile in nature. Scott and Jeff do a great job providing practical advice on how healthcare organizations can successfully partner with digital health companies.”

David Edelman
Chief Marketing Officer, Aetna

“Living the transformation in health, I know the path is not simple” That is why it is so refreshing to see the learning Scott and Jeff have brought in an extremely useful guide for change.”

Peter Corfield
Chief Commercial Officer, Spire Healthcare, U.K.

“…This book will help healthcare leaders – in any geography – win with consumers in their markets.”

About the Authors

Scott Davis

Scott is the Chief Growth Officer of Prophet, a leading strategic growth firm.  In over 25 years of brand and marketing strategy consulting, he has worked across an array of clients, including, GE, Allstate, Hershey’s, Microsoft, Boeing, Sara Lee, NBC Universal, the NBA, Target, Gulfstream, United Airlines, the City of Chicago. His work in healthcare includes Johnson & Johnson, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Mayo Clinic, Novant Health and an array of provider systems in the US and across the globe. Scott is a frequent guest lecturer at MBA programs across the country and served as an adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Scott is a contributing columnist at forbes.com and is the author of 3 previous books, including The Shift:  The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Leaders.

Jeff Gourdji

Jeff is a Partner and co-leader of the healthcare practice at Prophet.  With over 20 years of leading high-impact marketing & strategy projects, Jeff brings a breadth of experience that comes from working across many industries as a marketing practitioner, management consultant and political strategist. Jeff has worked extensively across the health care value chain across an array of growth challenges.  His current and past clients include Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medicine, Encompass Health, Anthem, Eli Lilly & Company and several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. Jeff is a frequent speaker and writer on healthcare topics and has been published or cited in Becker’s Hospital Review, Modern Healthcare, Medical Marketing & Media (MM&M), PM 360 and the Chicago Tribune. Jeff received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Want to speak to Scott or Jeff about how to become more consumer-centric? Contact us today.

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The Body, Mind and Soul of Digitally Evolved Organizations

Getting employees to believe in transformation efforts requires a bold new way of thinking.

Why Corporate Culture is the Biggest Impediment to Digital Transformation

When it comes to digital transformation, many companies say the hardest part is changing the culture itself. They often do a great job signposting new corporate values, like innovation and agility. They hold town halls and may even pour millions into expensive technology initiatives. At best, they get poor adoption rates. But often the worst happens: Nothing changes.

After a few rounds of announcements, disappointed (and increasingly cynical) employees sit back and wait. Their leaders tell them that things must change, but then offer platitudes about their position as traditional industry leaders. “There will always be a need for pharmaceutical sales reps,” they might say, or “Those start-ups don’t even make money.”

Meanwhile, employees watch, keenly aware of digital natives that threaten to disrupt their own industry. They have few choices: They can leave for fleeter firms, or stay put, watching the clock tick.

Do Your Employees Believe in Your Digital Transformation?

For most older organizations, the digital age presents a very specific challenge: How might we compete when the assumptions about where and how value is created have changed? They know the answers lie in digital, and it’s not as though these born-before-the-Internet companies have been standing still. Most have many digital things–websites, sophisticated email strategies, social media and probably at least one mobile application.

Still, progress is slow. And employees, who spend their outside time experiencing companies like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify, are painfully aware of how behind the curve their own employers are. Convincing them that true digital transformation is even plausible, never mind possible, is difficult. Why should they believe you?

“How might we compete when the assumptions about where and how value is created have changed?”

What makes it worse is that even though employees can see–everyone can see–that the company needs to make radical changes, internal strategy teams focus on gradual tweaks and long-term transformation, to minimize disruption. While employees can see the company needs to travel vast distances to catch up, their employers are only taking baby steps.

Relatively few organizations have truly asked themselves, “What would we look like if we’d been designed in the last 20 years?” and then set a rapid roadmap, three years at the most, for working backward to create those capabilities and the culture to support them.

Challenges of an Incremental Approach to Digital Transformation

And the unrecognized truth is that taking an incremental approach to digital transformation comes at a tremendous cost. The widely reported “retail apocalypse” is an obvious example. Over the last 25 years, nearly all retailers worked hard, but slowly, to launch to e-commerce websites and mobile apps. They tried to balance conflicts between physical and virtual stores, creating expensive loyalty programs that gathered customer data.

But their incremental approach was often too little, too late. In the U.S., for example, grocers didn’t fully anticipate the speed with which Amazon and Walmart would enter their markets with advanced digital capabilities for serving shoppers. Dozens of chains, including Toys R Us and Payless Shoes, were forced into bankruptcy by online competitors. Mainstream and luxury department stores, from JC Penney in the US to Harvey Nichols in the UK, are teetering. Across Europe, high streets have been similarly decimated, with House of Fraser the latest to struggle. And in Asia, online retail continues to sizzle, led by Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall, as well as JD.com.

That’s just one industry. Look at what Airbnb is doing to hotels and Uber and Lyft to taxi operators, or the way Grab is shaking up food delivery in Asia. These digital companies are succeeding because they know we live in an experience-first world. Customer wants are rapidly evolving, requiring dramatically new levels of organizational flexibility, agility and adaptability.

And that responsiveness is about technology, yes. But it’s very much about humans. Data can tell us what people have done in the past and what they need, but it can’t create new products and services. Digital technology can’t see trends, nor help you decide how to shift a business as markets evolve. It can’t drive culture, those values and beliefs that make people want to come to work for you every day.

Transforming an Organization’s Body, Mind and Soul

At Prophet, we’ve started thinking about digital transformation as rewiring the Body, Mind and Soul of the enterprise.

Body: Reinvent the Operating Model

A company is trained and equipped to achieve its vision if it can do three seemingly simple things:

  • Design customer-focused business processes unencumbered by bureaucracy
  • Create an organization with the right roles, empowered to make those processes fleet and effective
  • Shape a governance structure that makes it supremely easy to do the right things, versus being designed purely to block the wrong things

Modern operating models frequently depart from traditional approaches, organizing communities of practice instead of departments and using multi-disciplinary teams to understand customer needs and design new products, services and experiences.

For instance, a large financial services firm determined that its key strategic goal was to dominate the industry in customer experience and differentiate itself through service. But it was bogged down by business units so siloed that its best customers, those who purchased the broadest range of products, got the worst experience. Working with our team, the leaders agreed on a digital transformation vision. Two years after launching its new operating model, it has moved from being the customer-experience laggard to an industry leader, according to several analysts.

Mind: Energize the Talent

The relentless pace of innovation means that many companies struggle with a mismatch of skills and capabilities. This can even happen to digital companies: We recently worked with a global tech behemoth that couldn’t find a market for its newest products. It wanted to deliver innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products targeted at healthcare, but its talent wasn’t up to it. Product managers had never developed SaaS products before. Project managers weren’t trained in agile software development.

Addressing challenges within the Mind of your organization means pinpointing these mismatches, and either building skills through training or recruiting new talent.

Soul: Create More Meaning

The corporate soul, like the individual one, is as important as it is subtle. We approach Soul starting with the very DNA of firm: by identifying the purpose of an organization. We then begin defining the supporting values that make the firm a place that people love to work. Our recent research on purpose, based on 350 business leaders, confirms that this purpose must be evident to employees (and consumers) every single day.

And it must address big questions: What role do we play in the community? How well do we manage our impact on the environment? Is our workforce diverse? Are we adapting to technological change? Are we providing the retraining and opportunities that employees need to adjust to an increasingly automated world? Those with a well-defined purpose, like Starbucks, Patagonia and LEGO, inspire the way their people think and work toward the kinds of transformation that ensure values for customers and meaning in the work itself.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Balancing all three is challenging. But healthy human-centered enterprises recognize that mind, body and soul are connected. Organizational health–and the ability to step boldly into future transformation–comes from synchronicity between the three.

Learn more about how to spearhead your brand’s successful digital transformation.

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5 Fundamental Customer Experience Shifts Companies Need to Make

Rising consumer expectations means companies need to rethink what they mean by customer-centricity.

Evolved companies aren’t customer-centric. They’re customer experience-centric.

No matter who their customers are, these companies understand they are in the business of experience and they design their business models explicitly to compete on experience innovation. Amazon may have set the pace, but across every industry–from Lemonade in insurance to Coupa in procurement software to Veeva in pharmaceutical salesforce automation–companies are changing, and customers are responding.

Of course, everyone knows customer experience is important, and these days, it’s a mandate in every boardroom. Business leaders are realizing that memorable and engaging experiences aren’t just the key to growth, they’re the currency of the future.

But very few are doing it well. Spending money on experience and making it work are two different things. And as consumer expectations continue to rise, it’s harder for those offering merely ordinary experiences to catch up.

Challenges of Delivering Seamless Customer Experiences

While many companies are solving experience problems in blended digital and physical environments that delight customers in new ways, that complexity is challenging. Companies are scrambling to keep experiences consistent and on message across channels, markets and lines of business. And while messaging was once clearly under the control of marketing, the responsibility for experience, which now requires help from many disciplines, is diffuse, owned and driven by different departments.

Consumers, of course, don’t care about how complex or hard it is to deliver a stellar experience. They just know a few of their favorite brands that make it work every time, solving their problems and offering consistent ease of use—and the ones that fall short.

“Evolved companies aren’t customer-centric. They’re customer experience-centric.”

Exceptional experiences can only come from those using a holistic approach. Organizations must make philosophical and structural changes to truly be in the “business of experience.”
As many of those who have tried it know engaging contextual experiences don’t invent themselves. It takes a thoughtful reconsideration of the way employees collaborate with each other, capture data, set priorities, make decisions and measure success.

5 Fundamental Customer Experience Shifts Companies Need to Make

1. Experience for Its Own Sake to Bottom-Line Outcomes

Designing a magical, frictionless experience for its own sake is pointless. As companies get into the business of experience, they understand that the real objective is business impact, such as boosting revenue or increasing customer lifetime value. Clear business goals must precede design. Prophet partnered with an international life insurance company to build a CX playbook rooted in measurable business outcomes. After launching several rapid pilots—and seeing a real impact in conversion rates—the organization rallied around this new way of operating. The proof was in the metrics.

2. Brand Engagement to True Customer Obsession

Instead of thinking about customers at each touchpoint, genuinely understanding them calls for a much bigger picture. What worries them? What are their tensions? Their hopes? This holistic picture is essential and sometimes leads to big (and uncomfortable) realizations, such as the need to change the business model. This is how disrupters such as Casper, Lyft and Netflix have been able to become such disruptive forces in (and beyond) their industries; they became obsessed with unmet customer needs in their lives—not just how those customers interact with brands.

3. Brand as a Passive Voice in Experience to Experience Paying Off the Brand Promise

Branding is no longer just an element of experience; it has to drive it. The best experiences envelop customers, proving the brand’s value by offering something deeply personal. And conversely, poor–or even average–experiences undo that promise. After all, customers value brands more for the experiences they create than the promises they make.

4. Fragmented Touchpoints to Pervasive Digital-Powered Execution

In a world where customers leave digital breadcrumbs everywhere, running a business of separate islands —advertising here, in-store experience there– no longer works. Consumers have high expectations of consistency. When a furniture retailer asked us to reimagine its omnichannel experience, we put ourselves in the shoes of consumers, recognizing that the customer bounces back and forth between in-store and online constantly. We designed digital and retail touchpoints offering customers a consistent and personalized experience at every step of their buying journey.

5. Ad-Hoc Change Efforts to Change with Accountability

Initially, baby steps are required. But there soon needs to be a greater commitment, changing the way companies operate and collaborate. It calls for drafting the right technology roadmap and connecting decision-making to the best data. Moving along this curve requires conscious and vocal commitment from leadership.

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Experience Is The Face of Business Strategy

Experience is where the brand promise is either paid off or destroyed. At the same time, it is a way of building value that competitors can’t easily copy. The brand is the anchor that drives experience design, putting something in the marketplace that leaves an indelible impression in the mind of the customer.

Evolved enterprises understand that they are, at heart, experience-driven. They know the key ingredients are more than what the customer sees, and also take into account brand and operational models. And they strive to have these components work together, all reorienting the company to be in the business of experience.

Learn how Prophet can help your company become the customer-experience-driven enterprise that it needs to be.

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5 Tips to Better Train Executives on Digital Transformation

“What” and “how” are important. But without the “why” of transformation, digital efforts often fail.

If you are leading a digital transformation effort, you know how important it is to get executive buy-in. Yet many leaders have only a tangential grasp of what it means to be “digital” and shy away from getting their hands dirty. Altimeter found that low digital literacy or expertise among employees and leadership was the top challenge facing digital transformation initiatives. What’s frustrating is that while there is a plethora of training and development options, most executives still hang by their fingertips.

The problem is that most of the training programs focus primarily on the “what” and the “how”. What is digital transformation, What are the latest trends and business models you need to know (platforms, virtual reality, 3D printing, etc.), How do you use digital tools to engage with customers and employees, How do you lead a digital transformation process. But without the “why”, two things happen — they either never engage, or they see the potential but other priorities eclipse that early enthusiasm and digital fall to the wayside.

“The solution is to make digital transformation matter to each executive personally.”

The solution is to make digital transformation matter to each executive personally. I have been working with executives on their digital and social efforts for the past decade and the only successful, sustainable programs are those that continually reinforce the “why” of digital transformation.

5 Tips to Better Train & Develop Executives on Digital

Here are five tips on how to design or retool your digital training and development programs to ensure not only that executives develop a digital mindset, but that proactively seek out ways to improve their digital literacy.

  1. Tie digital to strategic objectives. Start with what is already a priority for every executive — the strategic objectives that they are on the hook to deliver. Identify how digital could help them achieve their strategic goal better, faster, more efficiently. There is not a single function or role that is not being impacted by digital — they key is to figure out why digital is important to each person. For example, if top line revenue growth is an objective, how can digital accelerate the decision making process with a target customer set?
  2. Put digital metrics on the executive dashboard. Every executive has a dashboard by which they measure their success. Having identified where digital can have an impact, include a few relevant, personalized digital metrics on the dashboard that connects digital to those strategic objectives.
  3. Enable peer mentoring. There is safety in numbers, and executives are no different. Hearing what’s working — and what’s frustrating — from their peers will give them the confidence and courage to try new things. Formalize the mentoring with “accountability partners” and make digital mentoring an item on the regular executive meeting agenda. Watch out for “reverse mentoring” where a lower-level (and typically younger) digitally-savvy employee is assigned to mentor an executive. The problem is that employees likely doesn’t understand the context of leadership for that executive and focuses on “what” and “how” without the “why”. I have found it infinitely easier to teach an executive how to think and be digital than to teach a digital native how to be a leader.
  4. Expose leaders to digital customers. At one company I’ve worked with, executives take every Thursday afternoon to go out and meet with customers. In the past few years, they’ve added digital channels to the mix, ensuring that executives see how customers use their mobile devices to engage with the company — and their competitors. There’s nothing like experiencing first hand the digital trials and tribulations as customers try to engage digitally with your organization.
  5. Engineer engagement. One of the hardest areas to change is the personal engagement of an executive on digital channels, either internally with employees or externally with customers and partners. In my book, “The Engaged Leader”, I lay out three ways to engage — Listen, Share, and Engage. Find ways to jumpstart direct, personal engagement by executives — the conversation and relationships they develop, if tied to strategic objectives, will sustain their digital engagement.

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If you don’t have a digital transformation leadership training developed, here’s a list of executive development digital transformation courses. Before you send your executives off on these courses, make sure that they understand the “why” of digital transformation and ensure that when they return from the course, you have an environment that will nurture their newfound enthusiasm for all things digital.

Altimeter also offers customized digital leadership workshops that can be stand-alone, day-long events or worked into the agenda of your next executive retreat or offsite. Learn more.

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Evolved Enterprise

Transformation isn’t about digital platforms. It calls for seamless experiences and flexible organizations.

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What does it mean to be an evolved enterprise?

Let’s be honest: most digital transformation efforts aren’t working. People are lost and don’t know where to begin. In fact, according to one survey, 90 percent of digital transformation projects have either fallen below planning expectations, delivered only minor improvements or altogether failed. There is a better way.

We call companies who successfully rise to meet the digital challenge evolved enterprises. Those who evolve think about digital differently. Regardless of what others have said, digital transformation isn’t about implementing digital platforms and cutting-edge technology – it’s about achieving growth by being committed to three key areas:

  • Developing transformational marketing strategies
  • Creating seamless customer experiences
  • Building smarter, faster, more flexible organizations.

To learn more about Prophet’s capabilities in helping companies develop digital transformation strategies that drive growth please read the eBook.

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BEANCAST 488: BAGALLSY

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Why Healthcare Orgs and Digital Startups Should Partner

Established healthcare brands can draw energy and agility through tech-focused collaborations.

As regulations continue to evolve toward value-based care and patients become more empowered to make healthcare choices, it’s more important than ever for healthcare companies to create compelling and satisfying experiences. In 2017, the industry saw an increase in digital healthcare startups dedicated to delivering consumer-centric healthcare experiences. This new crop of companies is disrupting the larger healthcare providers, payers, and pharmaceutical companies who are struggling to keep up. However, rather than seeing these startups as a threat, legacy healthcare companies can create valuable partnerships to help them deliver more consumer-centric experiences.

Key Steps to Partnering with Digital Healthcare Startups

Creating strong, mutually-beneficial partnerships with healthcare startups does not happen overnight. The best partnerships are formed with clear business goals for both parties in mind. To get started, Prophet has identified a few key steps to creating strategic partnerships:

Assess Internal Gaps

Assessing where internal gaps are will help find where partnerships are going to drive the most impact. Establish a clear vision for how partnering will improve consumer experiences and ladder up to broader business goals. We’ve found these gaps are commonly around data, interface, community, content or platforms. Assess current initiatives with a critical eye and define where the company can buy services, build the experience in-house, or develop a partnership. 

Map a Landscape

Mapping a landscape will narrow the field based on business priorities. There are hundreds of healthcare startups, so creating a specific set of criteria to focus the search will prevent companies from pursuing a partner only to find out later that it is not the right fit. This prioritization also helps companies understand the landscape of potential competitors.

Define a Clear Value Proposition

Establishing a clear value proposition will help jumpstart partnership conversations. Defining a common value proposition is often where healthcare partnerships go awry. Healthcare startups can benefit from the institutional knowledge and scale that large healthcare players have. Legacy companies also need to think through what benefits they can receive from the partner and come to the table with proposed synergies to generate excitement. These mutually beneficial partnerships can also drive innovation and result in a culture shift in larger organizations.

Don’t Just Fund, Co-Create

Big healthcare companies can avoid the risks of becoming just another investor by starting the partnership with collaboration sessions. Bring ideas to the table, but understand those ideas can only be improved upon through iteration. Set up teams and workshops to continue the collaboration and drive new solutions that deliver on the shared value proposition.

“Rather than seeing these startups as a threat, legacy healthcare companies can create valuable partnerships to help them deliver more consumer-centric experiences.”

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Developing a strategic partnership can help large healthcare companies jumpstart their journey to customer-centricity. When forming a partnership, many larger healthcare companies hit roadblocks created by existing cultural norms – whether that’s overcoming a “do it alone” mentality, accepting more transparent processes, or tolerating the uncertainty of test-and-learn.

However, companies that succeed in building strong partnerships often see benefits beyond an improved customer experience – they gain exposure to new cultural norms and more agile ways of working. These effects can spread across an organization and help large companies drive a wider transformation to customer-centricity.

Want to learn more about consumer-centricity in healthcare? Read Prophet’s recent report, “Making the Shift: Healthcare’s Transformation to Consumer-Centricity.”

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