A Burning Platform For Incumbents To Transform The Industry

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Healthcare organizations must reinvent healthcare from the inside, says Craig Samitt, MD, CEO of the national physician enterprise division of Surround Care.

Ann Kaplan and Craig Samitt, MD

4 min read

There’s a constant drumbeat about the need to disrupt healthcare. While start-ups, technology and retail giants, and others from outside of the industry garner most of the attention, healthcare organizations can — and should — be leading the charge, says Craig Samitt, MD.

Samitt understands what it takes to spread innovation across healthcare. During his 30-year career, he has been an advocate for adopting value-based care, improving operations, empowering clinicians, and more. Earlier this year, Samitt was named CEO of the national physician enterprise division of Surround Care where he is pushing to ensure that physicians play a larger role in transforming care delivery. Surround Care is the parent company of Navvis and Esse Health, which merged in 2022.

In this podcast with Oliver Wyman’s Ann Kaplan, Samitt details how incumbent healthcare organizations can be leaders in transforming the industry.

Show Highlights:

“We've become so obsessed with the latest shiny object that we've lost sight of the fact that we haven't solved healthcare's problems. And it's remarkable to me that I predominantly hear two things as I listen to ‘innovators in healthcare.’ Many disruptors or innovators either spend the majority of their time admiring our problems but don't have answers to fix them. Or, the other scenario that I hear, which is even worse, is organizations that are developing innovative ideas that make a lot of money for them but don't solve the patient's or the industry's problems.”

“In my view and my experience, change will come when we focus on physician partnership and support inspiration rather than manipulation, management, and control of doctors. Physicians and their teams have become victims of change in healthcare. And in my view, they should lead it.”

“I think for incumbents on the care delivery side, we can't get from where we are to where we need to be on a fee-for-service chassis. We need to be willing to be in the value space, be in the population health space. We need to be willing to bear the risk as an organization.”

“Change is partnership oriented. Incumbents have probably long wanted to bring about change but don't exactly know how. And I think there are organizations out there that enable that type of change that can help support organizations that want to go in a different path.”

“There was no better example of how incredibly broken healthcare was than when you're trying to knit together a very fragmented, imperfect system, even when you have a lot of healthcare knowledge, it's almost impossible.”

To learn more contact Matthew Weinstock, Senior Editor, Health and Life Sciences.

Authors
  • Ann Kaplan and
  • Craig Samitt, MD