By 2020, healthcare IT hopefully has managed to leverage the uptake of patients using innovative and user-friendly healthcare apps (“healthcare anywhere”) for the use of informed, engaged, cross-facility care prevention and care delivery.
For this to become reality, necessary steps are the establishment of a secure, trusted, and interoperable connection among healthcare provider and payer organizations for the standardized flow of information, as well as smart software solutions that support a rising number of risk-bearing healthcare organizations.
DistilNFO: Nils, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us. DistilNFO appreciates it.
To start with, tell us a little bit about yourself, your current role and your career journey so far.
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Nils Effertz: I grew up in Germany and enjoyed business school in both Germany and the US. Since then I spent most of the past 15 years in the healthcare IT industry in the US, gaining insights from a variety of business roles and perspectives (ranging from startups to Fortune 500 corporations to management consulting).
I’ve been focusing on further establishing and expanding ICW’s U.S. business since last year, when I joined ICW Inc’s Board of Directors as COO and CBDO. InterComponentWare (ICW) is an international eHealth company headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, and has invested substantially over the last years to strongly focus on the current and future needs of the U.S. healthcare market.
DistilNFO: What is your leadership style like, what has worked and what has not worked for you?
Nils Effertz: In an industry as dynamic, exciting, and ever changing as HIT, it is a constant challenge to find the right balance between a visionary, future-oriented leadership style that is focused on the key market trends, and a pragmatic, facts-based leadership that helps achieve short-term goals and enables the organization to run as efficiently as possible. It seems that things don’t work out as well once the scale is tilting too much to one side. In general, there are many brilliant minds in our industry and this country in particular, which means that even with the best ideas and business plans, the competitive environment ensures that only those with a focus on excellent business execution will do well.
DistilNFO: What is the most exciting thing you are working on currently?
Nils Effertz: The most exciting thing ICW is working on is providing the HIT infrastructure for implementing and accelerating the development and use of alternative payment and delivery models to reward better, more efficient, coordinated and seamless care for patients. We are proactively contributing to enhancing population health with our International Care Management Solution.
Secondly, our constant improvements of our Health Information Exchange (HIE) and Enterprise Master Patient Indexing (MPI) technologies are addressing the need for a truly robust, standards-based infrastructure solution which enables the establishment of a secure, trusted, and interoperable connection among healthcare provider and payer organizations for the standardized flow of information.
Thirdly, ICW is currently seeking a lighthouse customer to demonstrate our advanced use cases in care coordination and care management capabilities which include chronic care management (CCM), transitional care management (TCM), referral management, and episode management.
DistilNFO: What are the top trends in the Health IT Industry executives should keep an eye on and why?
Nils Effertz: Over the next year, we expect continued provider consolidation, a drive to providing a better “value proposition” to the consumer and payer, a renewed focus on cost management, and a steady stream of transactions that consolidate the acute, ambulatory, and the post-acute care components of the care delivery system.
Population health will continue to be a focus for many organizations. The growth of ACOs in both numbers and population reflects this trend. Employers will continue to demand better value for their healthcare dollar. Medical groups, hospitals, and health systems will find that they will be required to invest more resources and money into the infrastructure build-out to manage the populations’ health.
Bottom line, there will be a rising number of “risk-bearing healthcare organizations (HCOs) that need to be supported by smart software solutions.
While some of these trends will evolve slowly, we think that from an entrepreneurial perspective, we need to think big, start small, and start now.
DistilNFO: What is the best advice you ever got and how did it impact you?
Nils Effertz: With regards to my COO role: Be humble – you’re not perfect! Also: Don’t just accept the status quo. Challenge it and constantly push for improvements. This can be difficult to do, particularly in large organizations, but typically pays off in the long run – as long you truly believe in what you’re trying to accomplish.
From a business development perspective: Say what you mean and do what you say. Negotiations and agreements can be complex and difficult to close, so not deviating from one’s core principles and building up trust is key.
A person much smarter than me once said: Trust comes from Competence, Character, and Consistency. These are 3 attributes that we try to live and breathe at ICW every day.
DistilNFO: Success in today’s world depends on having strong teams that can deliver on a vision. Tell us about how you build, motivate and train your teams to be exceptional?
Nils Effertz: By trying to do what the healthcare industry should be focusing more on, too: Aligning incentives! Every team member, and every other stakeholder, should feel that their incentives are well aligned with the overarching goals. That may require some careful advance planning and structuring, but is critical to sustainable success. Communicating the common vision and joint goals regularly and clearly is also important, obviously. Ultimately, though, and particularly as a small company, you need to hire or partner with professionals that have a good core of self-motivation, ambition, and are eager to do something great together. So I’m looking for that “entrepreneurial spirit” whenever we’re expanding or putting together our teams. In addition, everyone has strengths and weaknesses – which means that good management is not limited to motivating or leading teams, but needs to ensure the right fit early in the process.
DistilNFO: A senior executive today gets around 200+ emails, has a packed schedule and has to deal with a new set of challenges everyday. What is your advice on managing time and work life balance?
Nils Effertz: In one word: Prioritize! The flood of communication channels and volume makes it impossible to treat every incoming request with the same focus and intensity. I also strongly believe in accountability and responsibility i.e. to quickly identify the right person for a specific task and then not interfere unless absolutely necessary.
At the end of the day, I try to remind myself regularly that one’s work and business success are only pieces of a larger puzzle. There are times when family life and other personal matters must come first. Working in the healthcare industry also offers constant reminders that a substantial amount of time should be set aside to pay attention to your own physical and mental health.
DistilNFO: What do you think are the top challenges Health IT executives have to prepare for in 2015 and beyond?
Nils Effertz: Instead of simply repeating the government’s “triple aim” top-down answer (better care, lower costs, improved outcomes), I’ll give you the top 3 specific to my business perspective:
- Combining the first phase of healthcare digitization (EMRs, EHRs) with cross-facility / cross-care team care coordination and care management capabilities
- Build up a robust, scalable and capable eHealth infrastructure in collaboration with existing record systems. Get the foundation in first – provide robust cross-facility patient identification, registries and longitudinal clinical records as the base to improve care coordination, care management and as input for meaningful clinical intelligence
- Positioning additional value add software solutions in a post-EMR world
DistilNFO: Give us your vision of where the Health IT industry may be in 2020.
Nils Effertz: By 2020, healthcare IT hopefully has managed to leverage the uptake of patients using innovative and user-friendly healthcare apps (“healthcare anywhere”) for the use of informed, engaged, cross-facility care prevention and care delivery.
I’m also hopeful that the landscape of software vendors in HIT will not look like an oligopoly of very few, consolidated offerings, but continue to produce bottom-up innovation via new entrepreneurial success stories.
DistilNFO: Can you share a few closing thoughts with our subscribers? Also, what is the best way to connect with you?
Nils Effertz: Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts with your valued readers. I feel privileged to work in such an exciting industry that deals with important problems and tries to drive real improvements in our society and for people’s lives. It’s easy to stay motivated and enjoy work when placed in such an environment.
I look forward to talking more about ICW to anyone who’s interested and elaborate on what we could do for your organization. Please don’t hesitate to contact me – I can always be reached via the contact information on ICW’s website at www.icw-global.com and am actively using Linkedin (where I have posted my personal email as well).