Risky Business: How to Seize Future Growth Opportunities

What’s New?

Major transformational shifts in health care have made it difficult to visualize the path to future success. And building out an effective strategy — in which advancing innovation, making savvy technology investments and forging sound partnerships are givens — can be fraught with complexity, ambiguity and risk.

So, what will separate the competition? A recent Deloitte report says organizations that are better able to integrate risk and make data-driven strategic decisions could succeed in building an improved value proposition for consumers and gain a significant competitive advantage. The report also notes that hospitals, health systems and others allied to the field will need to leverage agile and novel supply chains to provide consumers with “frictionless experiences.”

What It Means

The report highlights 10 business archetypes across three categories that likely will drive health value in 2040. These categories include:

• Data and platforms: Data conveners, science and insights engines that conduct research and generate insights far beyond human capabilities, and infrastructure builders.
• Well-being and care delivery: Health product developers, consumer-focused health communities, specialty care providers and local health hubs that provide education and treatment in a retail setting. These hubs will manage multiple stakeholders and connect to home health.
• Care enablement: Connectors and intermediaries who run just-in-time supply chain delivery, individualized financiers who offer personalized health care packages at lower costs and regulators who work to ensure consumer and public safety.

As providers and others in these categories identify growth opportunities, they'll not only need to excel at increasing agility and cost cutting, but also consider an integrated risk-management approach to drive future success. This calls for consistent approaches to identify, evaluate and manage risk across existing and new businesses, and developing a risk-aware culture.

Health leaders also are encouraged to view risk management as a way to generate value and create a competitive advantage that resonates with patients. Deloitte says organizations that develop an integrated approach to managing issues like cybersecurity will be better able to effectively harness health care data and digitally enhance the patient experience. This could lead to higher patient satisfaction from innovative services enabled by automation and augmented intelligence.

If all this sounds daunting, consider that the hospital community already enjoys significant competitive advantages over many market disruptors, including: operational expertise in care delivery, knowledge of specific community health status needs and having existing partnerships with other providers and community resources. Provider organizations also have patient safety and quality measures and systems in place and a growing experience level with value-based strategies.

Cybersecurity: 5 Ways to Capture Opportunities and Manage Risks

In one of the 10 issues explored in the report, Deloitte offers these five ways to help you take advantage of opportunities while managing risk in the complex world of cybersecurity.

1. Develop an AI strategy to capitalize on the power of cognitive technologies across the organization.
2. Assess your organization’s algorithmic risk exposure and build an algorithmic risk-management strategy and governance structure. Clearly define policies, roles, training and complaint- and incident-response processes.
3. Standardize processes and approaches for the deployment of algorithms, including the integrity and security of data being processed by algorithmic systems.
4. Conduct risk assessments of use cases for intelligent automation and consider independent third-party validation that checks and balances are in place for high-risk cases.
5. Periodically audit algorithms to test their functionality and detect undesired outcomes such as signs of bias and anomalies in behavior.

A recent AHA webinar on five cyberthreats and 10 ways to mitigate them is another valuable resource for organizations that are assessing cybersecurity strategy.