Fall is my favorite season, especially since I relocated to New England about five years ago. Every year there is a morning when the air smells different and I know fall has arrived. This happens even before the leaves change and just as the nights are starting to cool. Generally, I see fall as a time to return to routines, and, for our family with two young teens, new beginnings.
However, this year’s ‘fresh start’ is delayed, muffled, and tense with suspension and uncertainty. As a society, we have pervasive anxiety due to unknowns with climate change, social unrest, a high-stakes election, and especially this damn pandemic.
The silver linings have also been rampant and many, such as a slower pace of life and greater ability to connect with people near and far -- and for these we are grateful. And still, many of us come into this season feeling depleted and exhausted from months of uncertainty, disruption, and grief.
Collectively, we are resilient, hopeful, and moving forward. Yet, most have days where it can be hard to focus or when multitasking home and work life becomes difficult to navigate. Tara Haelle suggests we are collectively suffering from a period of extended crisis, “But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with.” En masse, we are a citizenry exhausted from conflict, anxiety, uncertainty, and, for too many, grief.
It is in this context that the healthcare industry needs to prepare for the fall. In the beginning of the pandemic we looked to solutions that could help us to ‘return to normal,’ such as the introduction of a COVID-19 vaccine or new treatment options. However, we now see that these ‘fixes’ are inconsistently understood, adopted, or trusted, and could take longer to deliver than we initially thought. It may have seemed unimaginable back in March, but now we enter fall and prepare for winter with an understanding that this pandemic is likely to be in our midst for some time to come.
In healthcare we must be ready for a sudden surge or contraction of services. We must be prepared to vaccinate, test, and treat the populace. We must plan to respond to shifts in coverage sources, funding, and policy at the local, state and federal level. We must remain agile, learn, look ahead, and prepare for many different scenarios. We need to watch for triggers and remain ready to respond to the unexpected. And we need to do all of this while our workforce is drained, either from working on the front lines or when working from home with children needing help, with smoke in the skies, or other exacerbating circumstances.
There are no easy answers, but here are some thoughts on how we can increase the resiliency of our healthcare organizations over the next six months:
Be prepared to address social needs: The past six months have been a time of reduced security due to the pandemic, economic uncertainty, weather events, social injustice, and other causes. In many cases, addressing the social needs of patients, consumers, providers, and employees at the human level is what is most critical for helping them maintain their health and access the care they need. Now is a good time to develop and expand your organization’s footprint in addressing social drivers of health.
Practical examples: Whether your organization is just getting started or has a long history of addressing social needs, here are some steps to advance this work:
Define your SDOH strategy: Many organizations have a range of independent SDOH initiatives but lack an overarching approach or SDOH strategy. Defining this strategy helps your organization to focus on which initiatives to pursue and increases synergies and impact of the work.
Expand the size of pilots and projects: Pilots can sometimes be too narrow and confined to achieve the scale of savings needed to demonstrate sustainability. Be sure that your efforts match your targets.
Leverage communities and partners: Non-profit organizations, community leaders, government programs, and healthcare partners all have something to offer in addressing social needs.
Raise visibility: Raising visibility of SDOH programs, services, committees, investment, and outcomes can increase the focus for people from across disciplines to come together to address new challenges arising from this work. It can also improve pride and belief in your organization.
Prioritize healthcare inequities: The data is unequivocal, and the individual stories are poignant. We have accepted inequities for too long and the problem is not too big to address. We can use this period of change to move toward a more equitable world.
Practical examples: Establish or further empower a health inequities task force; if you already have one, double their budget. Increase your use of data to get more specific about where inequities are occurring in your patient or membership population. Ask questions and highlight individual stories. Consider impact to healthcare disparities when prioritizing projects and planning how operational, clinical, and financial initiatives are undertaken. Remain humble and keep going.
Creatively capture your learning as you go: This disruption has shaken many of our assumptions about how our lives and our work need to be. Throughout our days, we recognize new opportunities and shifting priorities around us. When we find a way of capturing these insights as they occur, it gives people a chance to make meaning of disruption real time.
Practical examples: Establish an ‘insight in flight’ program for employees, patients, consumers, partners to share their insights through text, email, or phone as they occur. This can help to create future meaning out of current challenges. Highlight innovations or trends and what they could mean for your organization in a regular communication or brief. Invite input from different perspectives than your own, especially patients, young people, and people of different social and demographic backgrounds.
Engage in scenario planning: There is no perfect way to predict the future, but we can be more prepared. With scenario planning we explore different potential outcomes and consider the implications for our own organizations, stakeholders, patients, and consumers. We consider actions that would be valuable across scenarios and also trigger points for various possibilities. We recommend work groups that explore different variables over time and that come together for interactive sessions to consider implications. This can be difficult to achieve virtually, but at Spring Street Exchange we have evolved our processes to energize remote engagement.
Practical examples: For short- and medium-term scenarios, we recommend considering election results, economic climate, course of the pandemic, weather events, civil unrest, and other possibilities specific to a geography and organization. We also recommend longer-term scenarios to push thinking on emerging and expanding trends, changes in technology and business models, and other strategic shifts.
Nurturing kindness. Whether in the lunchroom, Zoom room or board room, we can always do more to extend kindness. Even as we drive change and make critical and sometimes difficult decisions, we need to find the capacity to pay extra attention to the human implications. As those around us deal with grief, uncertainty, and fear, we need to be able to sit with pain and listen to individual stories.
Practical examples: Many leaders have the luxury of Public Relations, Marketing, and Human Resources to extend these sentiments organizationally. We will also do well to send personal, maybe even hand-written notes, extend unexpected gestures, and go the extra mile for someone in need. Oftentimes, these interactions can have a refueling effect for all involved. Stop right now and send someone flowers.
These suggestions all connect the human experience with the goals of your business. During difficult periods this intersection could be what helps us to move forward as individuals and, at the same time, increase our own organization’s resilience. There is so much we cannot predict or affect, but these five ideas enable us to act and to do something that could make a difference.
This fall, I am worried about school, about the pandemic, and about our country. I am also sitting more, watching the trees. I am taking more walks than in past years and slowing down to reflect, listen to books, connect with music, and read poetry. And professionally, I am also devouring news and literature on healthcare, connecting with and listening to peers around the industry, preparing scenarios for the future, and trying to be more human throughout it all. It’s what I can do.
What steps are you taking to ready yourself and your organization for whatever comes next?