At the end of 2023, we published our annual piece on healthcare trends primed to shape the new year. Leaders from each of Jarrard Inc.’s five practices shared insights on various challenges and opportunities facing the health systems and other provider organizations they serve. In this week’s High Stakes podcast, we’re releasing our full conversations with Tim Stewart, Jarrard partner and leader of our Academic Health Systems Practice, and Emily Shirden, vice president and leader of our National Health Systems Practice.Because of their scale and varied business functions, national and academic health systems often struggle with an inherent distance from their patients. The rift between the ivory tower and the bedside is wide and impersonal. As such, many leaders are engineering cutting-edge ways to personalize care and create a more patient-centered brand.Key Points

Physician relationships: the secret key to system partnerships. Academic and national health systems alike are exploring innovative partnerships with smaller entities, such as community hospitals, to offer certain services, address a market gap or mitigate labor shortages. In scenarios like these, the larger system will be bringing on physicians who may be dubious of affiliating with the new brand. Preserving – or building – and strengthening these relationships are paramount to achieving the vision shared by organization and clinician alike.

Personalization: everyone’s talking about it. Creating a more user-driven experience was a popular topic in several of our practice lead conversations. Amazon was mentioned several times. But activating this idea — building some sort of online shopping aisle for patients to browse their care services — is more complicated than tech development. Patient data safety is a conundrum that stands in the way of large health systems who would otherwise have the resources to explore such an offering.

Smart offense: the art of advocating for yourself. In the face of widespread criticism, many providers are too slow to advocate for themselves. Rather than playing defense again and again to deflect every individual criticism, leaders should see these attacks as symptoms of a root cause: Trust is shaky. Healthcare leaders should address that issue by reinforcing their value proposition for every stakeholder — campaigning for themselves and the value they bring to their communities. 

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