As a former McKinsey partner based in London, I got to know Heathrow Airport well. So this summer, I shuddered at the notorious photos of the more than 15,000 passenger bags from 90 different planes all piled up into a nightmare-ish luggage mountain that took over Terminal 2. To those 15,000 passengers, a lost bag was far more than a mishap –– the consequences were far-reaching and personal.
In an industry powered by a workforce who spend their lives delivering intimate and compassionate care, it’s astonishing that those same caregivers face workplace violence rates higher than any other industry. In fact, according to Press Ganey’s latest data, in the second quarter of 2022 alone, 57 nurses were assaulted daily — that’s two assaults every hour.
As we begin to leave the pandemic era of the past two years, we are facing a new epidemic in healthcare settings across the country: Workplace violence — including physical and verbal abuse, harassment, and intimidation — against clinicians and staff has reached crisis levels.
Burnout is far from a novel issue in healthcare, and for the past decade, our industry has worked hard to identify, examine, and alleviate it. However, with every well-intentioned step forward, we seem to hit a new hurdle and stumble backward yet again — pushing our healthcare workforce to an existential brink.
When it comes to innovation, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. The surge of innovation in recent years aimed at improving healthcare for patients and healthcare professionals has been remarkable. Yet pervasive fragmentation underlying our industry leaves us with a paradoxical problem: The more we innovate to become more consumer-centric, the more that patients, providers, and payors are left to connect all the dots themselves and navigate a sea of new technologies.
As a health care provider industry, our efforts to elevate patient safety have been relentless, highly visible and with substantive improvements for the past several decades. Federal and state governments, insurance companies, employers and consumers have all played a role in driving the industry to enhance safety and quality for our patients. There have been parallel efforts to improve the safety of the workplace for our caregivers, but on arguably the most devastating reality of violence in the workplace, we have failed to find effective solutions and the problem has escalated.
What sets a physician apart from any other profession? Beyond the immediate qualifications that come to mind (highly-skilled expertise, tireless training, life-or-death decision-making), the true “heart” of a doctor was famously distilled by Dr. Martin H. Fischer in 1930: “Observation, reason, human understanding, courage—these make the physician.” Almost a century later, this is no less true today.
Healthcare’s “internet moment” is rushing towards us due to a convergence of forces, resulting in a massive shift toward personalized, consumer-centric care driven by connected cloud, computing, and other digital technologies. With the right technological infrastructure in place, we can capitalize on this moment to shift away from geographically and digitally siloed “sick care” to a system of consumer health experiences that span virtual and physical services while bending the cost curve.
Tech giants have disrupted nearly every industry, but there’s still one massive stronghold that’s yet to give way to the disruptive power of Big Tech: healthcare. You can’t blame them for trying. How often in a generation is there a multi-trillion dollar industry still poised for change on an industrial-revolution scale? The desire to “fix” healthcare and its longstanding access, costs, and experience challenges is perhaps one of the most uncontroversial ideas in our country’s discourse today. But the inertia of how healthcare got where it is today is the very reason Big Tech can’t seem to crack the nut.
