Healthcare CEO's Guide to Avoiding the Newspaper Industry's Mistakes

Imagine an industry, slow-moving, comfortable and secure in assuming its own irreplaceability.  Health care?  Well, yes,  But also newspapers, and therein lies a lesson or two.

From Forbes here's the Healthcare CEO's Guide to Avoiding Newspaper Industry Mistakes: (note that the underlined emphases are mine.)

"Health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a dramatic industry change. Turn back the clock 15 years and the following dynamics were present:

• Newspaper leaders knew full well that dramatic change was underway and even made some tactical investments. However they didn’t fundamentally rethink their model.
• Newspapers were comfortable as monopoly or oligopoly businesses allowing for plodding decisions. Their IT infrastructure mirrored the plodding pace with expensive and rigid technology architectures.
• Newspaper companies bought up other newspaper chains and took on huge debt.
• Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
• Depending on one’s perspective, it was the best of times or the worst of times to be a leader of local media enterprise.

"Before they knew it, owning massive capital assets and the accompanying crushing debt became unsustainable. The capital barrier to entry transformed into a boat anchor while nimble competition dismissed as ankle-biters created a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts dynamic. Competitively, newspaper companies worried only about other media companies or even Microsoft, but their undoing was driven by a combination of craigslist, monster.com, cars.com, eBay, and countless other marketing substitutes for their advertisers. In addition, there were easier ways to get news than newspapers. Generally, the newspaper’s digital groups were either marginalized or unbearably shackled so that the encumbered digital leaders left to join more aggressive competitors. The enabling technology to reinvent local media didn’t come from legacy IT vendors who’d long sold to newspaper companies, but from “no name” technologies such as WordPress, Drupal and the like.
"The parallels with health systems today are clear. Consider the present dynamics:

• Health systems have been aggressively gobbling up other healthcare providers and frequently taking on debt to finance the growth. Concurrently, health systems often have capital project plans that equal their annual revenues even though no expert believes the answer to healthcare’s hyperinflation is building more buildings. Consider the duplicative $430 million being spent in San Diego to build two identical facilities just a few miles apart as Exhibit A of the problem. Studying other countries that shifted from a “sick care” to a “health care” system, more than half of their hospitals closed. They simply weren’t needed or weren’t appropriate.
• Until recently, complex medical procedures always took place in an acute care hospital setting. Increasingly they are being done more and more in specialty facilities that can do a high volume of particular procedures at a signifiantly lower cost.
• Just as newspapers were implementing multimillion dollar IT systems while nimble competitors were using low and no cost software to disrupt the local media landscape, health systems are similarly implementing complex systems to automate the complexity necessary in a multi-faceted system. Meanwhile, disruptive innovators are implementing new models at a fraction of the cost and time. For example, it’s well understood that a healthy primary care system is the key to increasing the health of a population. Imagine if a fraction of the billions being spent by mission-driven, non-profit health systems on automating complexity was redirected towards the reinvigoration of primary care. They’d further their mission and lower their costs. Of course, they’d likely see revenues drop but presumably maximizing revenues isn’t the mission of a non-profit.
• The plodding pace and scale of innovation at most health systems isn’t up to the enormity of the task. The vast majority of health system innovation teams are constrained by how they have to fit innovation into an existing infrastructure. That approach rarely, if ever, leads to breakthroughs, as its true intent is to make tweaks to a current system rather than a rethink from the ground up.

Great article, one that should be required reading for every hospital CEO, board member and executive team.  The rest of you innovators and disrupters needn't bother.