In this past quarter of annual industry conferences and user groups, the notion of Sustainability has entered the vernacular of the healthcare market. Driven by healthcare reform and cost pressures, sustainability is a platform for business decisions and future market success. In this blog, we begin to decode the new sustainability messaging.
In the healthcare payer market in particular, sustainability discussions include one of three main attributes:
1. Sustainability of the business: What do we need to do to survive and thrive, while creating the smallest, least invasive and most flexible footprint?
2. Sustainability of the consumer relationship: How to we create greater consumer loyalty and cradle-to-retirement relationships?
3. Sustainability of business and technology responsiveness: What are the business and technology models that enable prolonged, successful management of a rapidly changing business environment?
Two notable examples feeding this discussion include:
Technology management:Healthcare reform and market pressures exert huge demands to control costs while exhibiting extraordinary levels of market responsiveness and flexibility. Sustainable technology management means moving from multi-year big bang technology legacy technology strategies to agile and flexible architectures and technology management strategies. These include partnerships, hubs, Saas and cloud computing models, and technologies that enable the organization to leverage existing investments (business process management tools, for example) and respond rapidly to continual new market demands are all sustainable technology concepts.
Consumer Loyalty:Consumer engagement means that consumers are more responsible for health and health outcomes. They also have greater choice and selection in an emerging individual market, and greater capacity to share information and experiences in the Health 2.0 marketplace. What are the business relationships that create the greatest customer loyalty? In this model, losing a customer, never an inexpensive proposition, becomes more expensive. Smart consumer segmentation, management and integrated wellness, health and care management strategies and processes all feed new models of sustainable consumer relationships that provide the time and loyal relationships to create the best improved health outcomes and cost reductions.
Sustainability in healthcare means the same as other industries: doing more with less, reusing, leveraging and extending, and building in a way that reduces legacy footprints as environments change. Healthcare payers will establish business practices and technology selection criteria in accordance with sustainability concepts; vendors will be introducing solutions marketed or modeled on this and more mature definitions by the end of 2010.
This blog orginally appeared on the IDC Health Insights Community.
