10 critical success factors to elevate the likelihood of success in the marketplace
Insigniam has identified a set of critical success factors that provide clear opportunities for elevating the likelihood of success in the marketplace and for significantly impacting the success of a healthcare system moving in the future.
In a 1984 Sloan Management Review article titled "An Assessment of Critical Success Factors," A.C. Boynlon and R.W. Zmud write:
"Critical success factors are those few things that must go well to ensure success for a manager or an organization, and, therefore, they represent those managerial or enterprise areas, that must be given special and continual attention to bring about high performance. CSFs include issues vital to an organization’s current operating activities and to its future success."
As the authors assert, critical success factors must be given special attention in order to bring about the impact and results the leveraged critical success factors represent. If employed and fulfilled upon, these leverage points provide the necessary foundation for impacting the mammoth industry of healthcare, as well as those elements of healthcare that have been traditionally reinforced and have rewarded the way it is.
These critical success factors rely on a commitment and capacity for reinvention and innovation. They include:
1. Indispensability. A healthcare system must make itself indispensable with an offering that healthy community residents, patients and payers cannot (and wish not) avoid or go around.
2. Reinvent patient experience. Work with patients to reengineer core patient processes to leverage technologies and drive dramatically better patient engagement and experience. There is a major distinction between understanding the role of the patient in healthcare and actually working with the patient to redesign healthcare.
3. New revenue cycle. Develop a highly effective, productive and efficient (i.e., simplified) revenue cycle.
4. Diversified, yet integrated specialization. Optimize physician network with strong physician leadership, collaboration, diversity of specialization and alignment.
5. Mindset of well-being. Creating a mindset for patient care that looks from a broad view of the overall patient's health and well-being across a continuum of care.
6. New horizons. Expand patient care beyond physician-centered and acute-hospital-located care delivery.
7. Embedded innovation. Embed in the organization a competency for creativity to continually innovate and rapidly execute innovation and change.
8. Leveraging new technology. Establish a strong capability and capacity to leverage information technology, including but not limited to mobile and web technology.
9. Transformational leadership. Leaders must be able to envision and execute on new, unprecedented futures while being highly skilled in the interpersonal skills needed to partner with physicians and care providers and to support and encourage creativity while maintaining discipline.
10. Culture of responsibility and accountability. In order to drive demonstrated value, both patients and providers will need to operate at higher levels of accountability. Organizational and clinical culture, processes and structures must be organized to institutionalize accountability and responsibility.