Managing Legal
The Point
The chief clinical officer of a 51-hospital system:
- “We are now leveraging telehealth technology in ways that will last long after this pandemic.”
- “The severity and suddenness of the Covid-19 emergency have hastened changes in how we deliver care.”
- “Things we’ve been trying to accomplish for years all happened in the last six weeks.”
Discussion
So wrote Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, chief clinical officer of Providence, a Catholic not-for-profit health system with 51 hospitals, in the Wall Street Journal, on March 28, 2020 (subscription required): “After the Pandemic, A New Frontier for Medical Technology: Telehealth Systems are Growing Rapidly in Response to the Crisis”.
Her essay is well worth reading as a lesson in how to make things better before an emergency forces one’s hand.
And it recounts how the urgency induced by the pandemic sped-up these efforts:
“Long before Covid-19, our team had created a strategic plan called “Clinical Care 2030” to use technology to provide personalized, affordable care by the end of this decade. Those priorities are suddenly on the fast track ….”
“Covid-19 has created a global crisis, but it has also fueled a sudden leap toward the future of medicine. Across the country, we are driving changes that will bring better health care to everyone once this nightmare finally ends.”
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This three-part series of posts is written with the following question in mind:
Will businesses’ experience with COVID-19 prompt their leadership to rethink the way they manage legal risk?
While we are still in the midst of its devastating impacts, COVID-19 reminds executive management of two stark realities that never really go away — but that the disease should prompt them to think about:
1. Prevention of catastrophe beats even the most dramatic rescue; and
2. The fact that next quarter’s P&L might not support expense levels planned at the beginning of the year counsels an uncompromising fight against waste anywhere — including in the legal budget.
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In the next post I’ll describe some promising developments among lawyers and others involved in legal service delivery that promise innovative efficiencies unknown in the current status quo.