Creating Disciplined Innovation In Healthcare with Baystate Health CEO Mark Keroack

Mark Keroack, MD, MPH, has been in and around the healthcare
industry for most of his life – long before he became President
and CEO of Baystate Health, a not-for-profit, integrated
healthcare system that serves over 800,000 people in western New
England.

Most people don’t know that medicine has always been a family
business for Dr. Keroack – his mother was a nurse, his father was
an “old-fashioned” doctor with an office right in their home, all
five Keroack brothers ended up becoming doctors, and he even met
his wife in medical school.

With this lifelong immersion in healthcare as a foundation, Dr.
Keroack has been on the front lines of innovation and digital
transformation in the industry. One example is TechSpring, The
Baystate Health Technology Innovation Center, which launched
under his leadership at BayState in 2014 to bridge the gap
between technology innovators and healthcare professionals. As
Dr. Keroack describes it, TechSpring lets entrepreneurs get
behind the firewall to work with real clinical and claims data,
and gives them an opportunity to work collaboratively with
physicians to identify and target specific problem areas.
Baystate Health is already using a number of innovations that
hatched through TechSpring and a few have also gone
commercial.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders,
Keith Figlioli talks to Dr. Keroack about the major shifts
occurring in healthcare and how health systems can and are using
innovation to adapt. Dr. Keroack offers his insider perspective
on a wide range of topics, including:




The Importance of “Disciplined Innovation” – there are a
lot of ideas being explored to improve healthcare, but where
most systems fall down, according to Dr. Keroack, is in their
failure to focus and capitalize on the ones that are proven to
work. To him, disciplined innovation means going “all in” on
the proven ideas and scaling them quickly. Focusing intently on
the ideas that work can also help ensure a balanced approach to
managing the dichotomy between people in a healthcare
organization struggling with change and those who want to adopt
new processes and technology as fast as they can. One example
Dr. Keroack cites is BayState’s partnership with
DispatchHealth, a startup that provides an on-demand, mobile
emergency room. DispatchHealth has already made 700 visits
around Springfield, Massachusetts and 80 percent of them helped
divert patients from making ER visits. With a net promoter
score of 95 – a higher NPS than even Apple, Dr. Keroack points
out – BayState is working to scale its use of DispatchHealth
quickly.



The Double-Edged Sword of Integrated Delivery – Private
practices are becoming more and more rare, and other than
boutique primary care practices in wealthy areas or more niche
specialties such as ophthalmology or urology that have a better
chance of surviving on their own, that trend will continue
according to Dr. Keroack. Some things can get lost in this new
reality, such as the entrepreneurial spirit and the intimate,
personal touch you get from a small office. But there are also
many positive gains. Obsessing about how to design systems of
care across specialties and across regions often yields better
outcomes, or at least less variable outcomes. To Dr. Keroack,
this is one of the great motivations of building an integrated
delivery network.   



Narrowing the Gap to Consumer-Friendly, Tech-Enabled
Healthcare. Productive paranoia is a good thing, and amidst
new market entrants like Optum, CVS/Aetna, Walmart, Humana and
others, Dr. Keroack says he wouldn’t be doing his job without
it. These companies have tremendous resources and sophisticated
consumer instincts and technology that they’re using to target
– and become the front door to healthcare for – a narrow niche
of the continuum that traditional systems manage. If they’re
successful, it could leave