Navigating Seven Key Challenges in Healthcare Leadership Today (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: One of the things we've been thinking about here at IHI recently is how complex it is to be a leader in healthcare right now. And we've identified seven challenges that all healthcare leaders are facing all over the world. They go something like this. So the first is a set of political challenges. Healthcare is probably the dominant political issue in most of the countries in which we currently work. Secondly, there's a set of financial challenges. The economics of healthcare are tough. Thirdly, there are some demographic issues, especially around the aging of the population, and that in turn causes the fourth of our challenges, which is a changing epidemiology. Five, customer expectations are changing. People expect different things of healthcare today than they used to. Sixth, there are new technologies and they impact on healthcare in a range of ways. And seven, our workforce is also changing in line with those demographic changes. Here's the kicker. The real difficulty is the fact that we do not face any of these challenges individually. Rather we face them all together in a confluence every day in healthcare. And so we can't pick them off individually. Let's deal with the political challenges today and next year we'll get around to dealing with the demographics. It's a situation that demands a set of complex solutions to a set of complex problems. I believe that HL Mencken was right when he said, every complex problem has an answer, which is simple and wrong. And so what we're going to try and do here at IHI is find some of the solutions to those seven complex problems. And so along with the two other CEOs IHI has had in its history, Dawn Berwick and Maureen Bisognano, we will be exploring these seven categories with an eye towards improvement. That is after all one of the things that IHI does best. So I hope you'll join us in October at our Fall Change Conference. Come learn with us, come share your ideas with us, come lead with us. These challenges aren't easy to solve, but together we can make great progress.