How Value IQ + EQ in Leadership Creates Sustainable Improvements

I recently hosted an in-person focus group with key healthcare executives. The topic of discussion was “How Value IQ + EQ Creates Sustainable Improvement.” The group agreed with our initial thesis that, more often than not, healthcare organizations fail to seek and realize full benefits and value when investing and implementing enabling technologies. We identified several reasons behind this challenge along with how a process framework combining Value IQ and Value EQ can help create a sustainable environment for identifying and realizing benefits and continual improvements.

You are likely familiar with many of the challenges healthcare organizations face when implementing new technologies. Often these challenges emerge from a lack of up-front activity to identify, quantify, and mandate improvements that would ensure the realization of benefits for large projects, often technology investments, and help track progress and sustainment of the desired outcomes. Challenges tend to appear when organizations are narrowly focused on implementation activities instead of concentrating on desired results that would drive on-going operational excellence. Plus, without proper guidance and planning, we see a lack of adoption and achievement of best practices and optimized workflows that would raise and sustain overall performance. Of course, it doesn’t help if the organization is missing the effective communications and formal change management to prepare the business for the transformations.

While our group agreed with the challenges most organizations face, they were curious to learn what we considered to be the key ingredients of Value IQ and Value EQ and how they could help ensure investments were delivering measurable and persistent value.