Bradley Crotty, MD, is the vice president and chief digital engagement officer of Milwaukee-based Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin Health Network.
Dr. Crotty will serve on the panel "How to Create a System for Driving Effective Innovation" at Becker's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place Oct. 4-7 in Chicago.
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Becker's Healthcare aims to foster peer-to-peer conversation between healthcare's brightest leaders and thinkers. In that vein, responses to our Speaker Series are published straight from interviewees. Here is what our speakers had to say.
Question: What are you most excited about right now?
Dr. Bradley Crotty: Partnership opportunities excite me the most. While we continue to grow our digital product engineering team to create experiences that advance patient wellness and digital engagement, we won't be able to do everything. We are looking critically at where we develop partnerships to advance care for our patients in ways we couldn't do alone.
Q: What challenges do you anticipate over the next two years?
BC: The financial pressures that systems are facing right now are difficult, but I would say that cutting innovation would be ill-advised. At Froedtert & MCW, our investment in innovation and digital paid significant dividends when the public health emergency began, as we had partnerships and an internal structure to support remote monitoring, telehealth, and asynchronous care. These investments enabled us to serve our community efficiently, even without a lot of staff.
Staffing shortages and the amount of change faced by our operational teams are our main challenges. As a profession, we must work with payors and policymakers to adjust the care model further. This is the hard work ahead.
Q: Where are the best opportunities for disruption in healthcare today?
BC: Using the Clay Christenson teaching of disruptive innovation, I'm most interested in looking at what the lower end of the market is doing. The so-called 'inferior' products and services ride the wave of technology to overcome the incumbents. Telehealth, particularly asynchronous care, is likely to do this. It may not be as shiny as a physician-based visit in a large delivery network, but it helps meet the needs of people in new ways at a lower cost. Also, these care models will be increasingly sophisticated.
Q: How is your role as chief digital engagement officer evolving? How are IT teams changing?
BC: Digital is evolving in healthcare, with many organizations creating either new or hybrid digital officer roles. It reflects how digital delivers and transforms the health care experience rather than merely enabling it. The ecosystem is also becoming more complex, and partnerships must be forged between clinical, business, technology, digital and security teams.