Supporting Health System Change

Ultimately, it comes down to the solution. What do I mean by this? The ecosystem. Supply chain is not a chain, it's a network. It's a network of activities, of information, people, processes and data. We're interdependent upon each other.

How many of you have an iPhone? Who are the brave souls that have Androids? All right: If you're an Apple user, would you switch to an Android? Why not? Just because? Okay, has anyone ever tried switching? How easy was that? It was awful. It was painful.

You know what Apple's done? The “walled garden”. They made a platform. They aren’t just providing us ingredients and saying this app and this application and this is where your photos are. They are providing an ecosystem and a platform with which you can engage.

So as your own companies and businesses, how are the different units of your organization — wound care, lab, etc., you have many different specialties — how do you as an organization come together across your specialties to engage with your customer, the health system? How do you present and provide that unified platform position? How do you become the “Apple” of your company in the way that you're dealing with your customers?

I recognize how in any business we all have vertical responsibilities, right? But what I would challenge in terms of what health systems need is this concept of the platform solution and the dyadic business partner.

The dyadic industry partner: We have physician leads and administrative leads in hospitals, we call them dyads, right? So how do you become that dyad representing your company as a whole, recognizing you have individual business units?

One of my greatest pain points that my team expresses, that I've experienced, is companies come to us as individual units. They're trying to sell us this and two months later or a week later, we're having a conversation on this and they don't even know they talk to each other.

How many of you guys have heard that? You guys have never heard that from your customer? Yeah? What are you doing about it? How are you thinking about the scaffolding of your organization to address that horizontal need of your business?

So if you want to address and be that painkiller in that pain point, come to me as that “Apple”, come to me as that dyad and come to me as that platform solution, because that's where you're going to add value.