The influx of new technologies combined with the sheer scale of challenges facing the healthcare sector led Warwick Business School to identify it as a key area of focus, says Relationship Manager, Jennifer Griffiths
Healthcare across the western world is facing a crisis. Healthcare systems are confronted with ageing populations and dwindling resources in the US, Japan and much of western Europe. According to the United Nations, people over the age of 60 will make up 20% of the world’s population by 2050; in the UK, the proportion will be 25%.
Increases to a country’s average lifespan tends to lead to a greater prevalence of complicated, chronic illnesses requiring long-term healthcare. For example, dementia is one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide.
This can cause a vast strain on hospitals, which are already under significant pressure in countries such as the UK. Elderly patients are staying longer in hospital, occupying beds that are needed for urgent admissions, and increasing their risk of acquiring infections or developing complications.
Once discharged from hospital, patients often need specialist social care at home, another under-resourced area, and one for which there is increasing demand. Long-term conditions affect all age ranges, but many disproportionally affect older people.
The negative impact of poorly managed long-term conditions is huge. According to Graeme Currie, Professor of Public Management at Warwick Business School (WBS), care of some 15 million people with long-term conditions consumes 70% of the National Health Service (NHS) budget in England (£77bn GBP annually), as well as £10.9bn GBP of the £15.5bn GBP spent on social care in England.
Without appropriate action relating to long-term conditions we will continue to see unnecessary acute admissions: patients end up in emergency departments only to be discharged unsafely and returning to those same emergency departments soon after. It is a revolving-door situation.
Fortunately, help may be at hand in the form of the fourth industrial revolution, with its cornucopia of emerging technologies including 3D printing, AI, chatbots, virtual reality, smart pills and gene editing. These could ease the burden for clinicians and managers, freeing up time and valuable resources to improve patient care and bringing cost savings to hospitals to spend on much-needed facilities.
Transforming healthcare
Healthcare’s combination of huge challenges and influx of new technologies led WBS to choose the sector as one of eight areas of focus identified as ‘changemaker’ challenges, and that are destined for a revolutionary future. It then established the Organising Healthcare Research Network (OHRN) which brings together researchers to apply the organisational principles of business to healthcare settings.
For the past 20 years (ever since Professor Andrew Pettigrew – now at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School – produced Shaping Strategic Change, a classic study of strategic management in healthcare), WBS has generated applied research in the organisation of healthcare. In a recent round of research funding awards from the UK’s National Institute of Health Research, three research studies secured funding, of which two were led by WBS, with the third encompassing a significant WBS contribution.
The OHRN brings together staff from many of our specialisms to look at fields as diverse as design of the physical environment in clinical settings for behavioural change and wellbeing; patient safety; e-health; markets, choice and consumerism; financial incentives; IT and telehealth; managing change and emotions; knowledge mobilisation and innovation; leadership; workforce development; operations management, and social networks.
As part of its focus on healthcare, the School offers an MBA specialism in healthcare and hosts the WBS Healthcare Case Challenge, organised by a committee of full-time MBA students. They invite teams from Business Schools and universities around the world to compete over two days to produce solutions to issues in the sector. This case challenge has been designed to encourage the convergence and intermingling of multidisciplinary teams that comprise not just MBA students, but participants from varied disciplines.
The challenge has evolved continually over the past seven years and now has three key partners (GE Healthcare, GE Healthcare Partners and Pfizer Healthcare Hub) that determine the topic for each year, working with The Stocker Partnership, which writes an in-depth case with references. GE and Pfizer are always keen to meet with future healthcare leaders with a view to hiring high-potential candidates, once they have finished their MBA course. Over the years, topics have included:
- Addressing heart failure challenges with digital technologies
- Early detection of atrial fibrillation
- Early detection of sepsis
- Dementia care in the community
- The emergency department of the future
- Patient adherence using digital technologies
Increasing digital adoption and engagement
Held in June, this year’s competition asked teams to design innovative approaches that enable digital adoption and increase digital engagement in healthcare, either from a patient or staff perspective.
Teams are given a briefing pack several weeks ahead of the competition, filled with research and detailed information about the problem. From this, they must design and present an A1-sized poster to explain their findings. The pack gives them the starting point to delve deeper into the problem.
In the final week before the competition, teams also receive a media pack so that they can build on their initial research and start work on developing a solution and their presentation for the two-day event.
The challenges have been a great success. While the winners receive a cheque for £4,500 GBP, all participants gain excellent networking opportunities with industry leaders and fellow students from around the world. This has led to MBAs gaining new careers and making friendships that continue to this day.
Student participants appreciate the opportunity to apply their experience and classroom learning to a problem that is of crucial importance to society, studying the complexities and gaining insight into a sector undergoing great change due to emerging technologies.
For those full-time MBAs on the organising committee, it is also a chance to put learning into practice, from marketing to organisational behaviour.
In addition, winning ideas have been taken on board by GE Healthcare and Pfizer. Marc Barlow, Head of Strategic Marketing Solutions Marketing Organisation at GE Healthcare and a judge for the past five years was particularly impressed by the winners of the 2015 challenge, which asked participants to present innovations for hospitals’ emergency departments.
He explains: ‘The teams identified and developed a number of excellent approaches to enhancing the performance of the emergency room and the winning team from Alliance Manchester Business School developed some highly innovative solutions the judges felt could really make a difference to how care is delivered in this setting.’
Healthcare is a huge and rapidly changing sector, with technology set to play a big part in its evolution. The WBS Healthcare Case Challenge is a great way of showing students that their skills and knowledge can be applied to the sector, where organisational principles and processes are just as applicable, especially when innovation is now a critical part of health.
Jennifer Griffiths is Relationship Manager at Warwick Business School in the UK. Jennifer has been helping full-time MBA students to organise the WBS Healthcare Case Challenge since its inception in 2012.
Student organisers of WBS’s Healthcare Case Challenge
Farah Abdul Hadi volunteered to be Director of the WBS Healthcare Case Challenge in 2016 and is now Senior Consultant and Assignment Manager for clients in the UK and across the Middle East at GE Healthcare Partners.
‘When I started working on the case challenge, I didn’t expect to get
a job out of it, but to apply my MBA experience and take part in an extra-curricular activity.
‘The challenge was finding solutions to managing dementia. When I gave a speech at the final ceremony, a senior partner at GE Healthcare was listening. He emailed the School and mentioned me by name.
‘Consulting was what I wanted to do and, in healthcare, I felt I could benefit myself and help other people. I reached out to the GE Healthcare director and landed the job.
‘Most people go to career fairs, networking events and résumé workshops, but there are other opportunities that can help you stand out.’
Yajur Mahendru was Director of Logistics for the 2019 case challenge and despite prior project management experience, he felt he learned a lot from the event.
‘Helping to organise the case challenge taught me many things – most importantly, the differences between organising an event in my home country and the UK. It was great to work in a highly diverse team, with people from Azerbaijan, Brazil, Germany, India, Ireland, Jordan, Mexico, New Zealand, Thailand and the UK.
‘Different members held different portfolios, such as marketing, external relations, finance and logistics. High energy helped to make the event a success. We worked as a team and it was interesting to learn from one another.’
The Healthcare Case Challenge participant
Fiorello Fernandes took part in the 2019 WBS Healthcare Case Challenge. Having worked in aerospace for a decade, he was eager to apply his engineering skills to a new area
‘Participating gave me a completely new perspective on designing complicated and critically important customer solutions. It was not just a test of my ability to dive deep into an unfamiliar category, but also of my design thinking skills – to take apart an existing system and put together a new solution.
‘Meeting some of the most venerated product design and digital transformation experts from GE was a privilege that has further fuelled my ambitions. If I had to boil what I learned down to three key points, I would have to say:
1) Put yourself in the end user’s shoes
2) Do not work in silos
3) Stay calm when stress strikes.’
