Healthcare Progress Is In the Eye of the C-Suite Survey Respondent

With a little extra effort, you always can find something revealing in surveys of healthcare executives, even when a multi-billion dollar, vertically integrated incumbent healthcare company sponsors the survey.

In this case, the sponsor is Optum, and the survey is its 2022 C-Suite Check-In: Leading Through Disruption report. You can download the seven-page survey report here.

Frankly, I didn’t know this was an annual survey done by Optum until the company mentioned it in this year’s report. So, I downloaded the 2021 report, C-Suite Check-In: New Research Findings on the State of Health Care. The 2021 survey report is 15 pages, and you can download it here.

The fun part, of course, is comparing how the two different sets of healthcare C-suite respondents — 153 in this year’s report and 161 in last year’s report — answered the same questions. The fun part revealed that healthcare executives are less optimistic about transforming the healthcare delivery system in the U.S. in key areas.

Here’s what I mean:

• 92 percent of last year’s execs agreed or completely agreed that the healthcare industry has made progress in care delivery innovation. That dropped to 65 percent this year.
• 69 percent of last year’s execs agreed or completely agreed that the healthcare industry has made progress in patient and consumer engagement and experience. That dropped to 52 percent this year.
• 62 percent of last year’s execs agreed or completely agreed that the healthcare industry has made progress in data and analytics maturity. That also dropped to 52 percent this year.
• 47 percent of last year’s execs agreed or completely agreed that the healthcare industry has made progress in care payment and funding evolution. That’s similar to this year’s 48 percent.

The only area in which this year’s cohort was more optimistic than last year’s cohort was how they felt about the progress being made in infrastructure development and modernization. It was 76 percent this year compared with 65 percent last year.

So, what explains the drop in optimism this year? Maybe this year’s cohort is grumpier than last year’s cohort. Maybe the survey caught this year’s cohort on a bad day compared with last year’s cohort. Or maybe execs are realizing that fixing healthcare is more of a slow grind than an overnight sensation.

I know a lot of grumpy healthcare executives who do have bad days. But I’m betting on the latter. The Healthcare Industrial Complex® is dug in deep, and it’s not going to give up ground easily. It will be a slow grind to win the customer revolution in healthcare.

Thanks for reading.