Posted on Fri, Mar 16, 2012 @ 12:54 PM
In 2012, Global Partners launched the CEO Insight Series, a quarterly publication of interviews with leading and greatly admired CEO's. The first in our series is with Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic is a multi-specialty healthcare system which is rated as one of the top 4 hospitals in the US and number 1 for cardiac care by US News and World Report. In addition to being a renowned cardiac surgeon, Dr. Cosgrove is an inspiring and innovative business leader. We feel that regardless of your industry, Dr. Cosgrove's ideas on the application of technology, funding innovation and maintaining brand values while pursuing global growth will provide relevant and thought-provoking insights for your business.
We are not the first company to interview CEOs of course, but we believe we are the first to do so with a specific goal: Demonstrate that once companies understand insights from CEOs of their key customers, they can put this learning to use in building Trusted Business Partnerships.
In our 20 years of experience working with leading global companies such as GE, Merck, Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson, Philips and others, we have found that their customer-facing people in sales, marketing and service are usually good at cultivating peer-to-peer relationships.
However, they often miss out on making the connection with the critical issues and core beliefs of customer's CEOs, Division Presidents and other CXOs. Imagine how much more effective business relationships would be if people clearly understood their customers' most important issues across all levels?
In our experience, this causes a fundamental shift in customer relationships, from simply good suppliers to Trusted Business Partners.
Our first CEO Insight Series E-book has many valuable insights for your company and it's free. Simply click here to download the ebook.
At the end of the ebook we have also provided a description of a Partnership Insight Lab, which is our process to discover customer insights, starting with those of senior executives, and cascade and apply them throughout your own organization. If this sounds interesting to you, we would be happy to discuss the Insight Lab or the ebook with you at your convenience.
Posted on Tue, Jan 31, 2012 @ 08:57 AM
For global businesses, extending their brand and their business on a global scale is a well-known, almost routine strategic process. When a brand is introduced in a new country, different cultural dynamics and business practices play a big role.
For example businesses need to carefully balance maintaining the brand’s core values and messages while adapting core processes and practices for local conditions. The key challenges for executives are how to leverage the strengths of their brand, avoid diluting their hard-earned reputations and make their business work in a totally different culture and environment.
In this final article, based on interviews with Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, Dr. Cosgrove discusses the challenges and opportunities of exporting the Cleveland Clinic.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What made you first believe a Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi was a good idea?
DR. COSGROVE: The demand was clearly there. Patients have been coming to Cleveland Clinic from the Middle East for more than 40 years. Royalty, business leaders and ordinary people. By the early 2000s, we were doing about 35 heart operations a month on patients from the Middle East. My predecessor thought we could reduce these patients’ need to travel by meeting them halfway, in England. We considered buying a hospital in London and looked at several opportunities. But it soon became clear that it would be too difficult to do business in England. So we passed.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What made Abu Dhabi attractive?
DR. COSGROVE: Before Abu Dhabi, we spent about a year and a half exploring a potential collaboration in Dubai, the Emirate next door. During that process, we were approached by Abu Dhabi and the Mudabala Development Corporation. They proposed a unique collaboration. We would share our medical and organizational expertise, and they would build a 5 million square foot, state-of-the-art medical center. They would also pay salaries and a management fee. The benefit was clear. We would be able to bring our model of medicine to a whole new population at no financial risk. At the same time, however, the project posed huge reputational and operational liabilities.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What was most important from an operations and reputation standpoint?
DR. COSGROVE: From the operations standpoint, we were being asked to undertake a complete cultural transfer of our quality, safety and procedural standards. This isn’t something that happens overnight. So we negotiated a 15 year contract. This gives us time to develop a medical center that will benefit the people of this region for a long, long time.
From a reputational standpoint, we risked diluting the value of our brand and the equity we’d built up over 90 years of patient care. We couldn’t afford to put our name on anything that didn’t reflect the highest standards of medical excellence. Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi needed our DNA. Our solution was to put Cleveland Clinic people in all key leadership positions. They’ll be joined by some of the best physicians from all over the world. We will bring managers and administrators to Cleveland to learn and see how we do things. We’ve got around 200 of our people in Abu Dhabi now with the facility still under construction... within two years, we plan to ramp up to 3,000.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: This is an incredible brand odyssey. Can you tell us where the Cleveland Clinic goes next?
DR. COSGROVE: I can’t say, but nothing would be undertaken without careful diligence. We get an amazing number of requests for international partnerships; one from India last week, one from Korea, one from China. You know, there are very few things the world wants from the United States any more, but healthcare is one of them.
Below is a video of the five million square foot facility for the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: When will that open?
DR. COSGROVE: Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi is now scheduled to open in late 2013.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: How will that be different from the Cleveland Clinic here in Weston, Florida, is it that same concept then, of staffing certain people then hiring locally?
DR. COSGROVE: It’ll be very similar to Cleveland Clinic Florida, Weston, where the demand for our services already exceeds capacity. Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi will be much bigger!
This article concludes our series on CEO Insights, featuring Dr. Toby Cosgrove. Throughout the series Dr. Cosgrove touched on topics that are clearly on his mind and undoubtedly on the minds of all Healthcare Executives.
As you think about his comments, consider the implications for your organization. Is your business focused on the challenges and issues that are most important to your key customers? Are all of your people who interact regularly with customers at all levels, not just CEOs, aware of what’s on the minds of their customer contacts? And perhaps most importantly, can they provide real value to their customers by helping them to address their most urgent challenges?
For further information on how to create a culture of Trusted Business Advisor contact us or visit our website. And be on the lookout for our e-book, CEO Insights, featuring Dr. Toby Cosgrove and future editions for our CEO Insights series.
Posted on Thu, Jan 05, 2012 @ 11:50 AM
Accountability is a key requirement for all organizations. However, healthcare companies and hospitals are more accountable than other industries because they have to improve not only revenue and profitability but patient outcomes as well. For nearly 20 years, Global Partners has worked with leading companies in healthcare and have experienced this challenge first hand.
This combined focus on business, operational and patient results has led to a new kind of healthcare model called Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), a type of payment and delivery reform that seeks to tie provider reimbursements to quality metrics and reductions in the total cost of care for an assigned population of patients.
ACO represents a unique opportunity for the healthcare providers and government to work in collaboration. In our third interview with Dr. Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, we talk about how the Cleveland Clinic, a multispecialty academic medical center and one of the leading healthcare institutions in the world, sees ACO’s and their future in healthcare.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: We’re curious about your view of ACO developments, the viability of ACO’s and what the impact might be on the Cleveland Clinic and technology?
DR. COSGROVE: Are you talking about the Unicorn?
GLOBAL PARTNERS: You mean they may exist but I’ll believe it when I see it.
DR. COSGROVE: That’s right. The first iteration of ACO came from the government. It was modeled on a risk reward ratio. It was totally untenable. No one stood up and saluted it. There were a lot of comments back. After that, it took two years for the government to write what the definition of an ACO was. I don’t think they could change the payment system in the next two years, so that all of a sudden it happens every place. So I think we’re going to be sort of like we are with the electronic medical record. We’re sort of half way into electronic and half way still on paper. So I think the question really is timing and how you plan for an organization like this, how fast that you rollout something like an ACO.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What will advance the ACO model?
DR. COSGROVE: What we’re really talking about is paying for healthcare in a different way then we have previously. And if that’s going to happen, 50% of that pay is going to have to come from the government.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What are other key factors?
DR. COSGROVE: Accountable healthcare is the result of two major things - Pay less as a result of doing more monitoring. The Cleveland Clinic has a lot of quality metrics now. We report 65 metrics to the government and are expecting to report 85 in the next couple of years. So we are working very hard to take cost out of our system through better measurements and reporting.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: Do you have a time horizon for ACO’s to be a reality? When will we see the Unicorn?
DR. COSGROVE: You know, where it falls in the priorities is going to determine how fast we’re going to see it implemented. I think it’s really as simple as that.
Simple wisdom puts complex issues in perspective to create advancements within organizations. In our interview with Dr. Cosgrove, and in our work with leading companies trying to do business better and smarter in a rapidly changing global marketplace, we often see that achieving breakthrough advancements often comes down to determining where they fall in the organization’s priorities.
Whether you are in healthcare or another industry, we are interested to hear how you prioritize and address the complex issues in your organization.
Posted on Tue, Dec 13, 2011 @ 09:36 AM
One of the more important topics for any organization today is innovation and, in particular, the results achieved through innovation. While every company sees a role for developing new innovations, many are not able to put in place a process that sustains this discipline and measures its value.
As the educator Laurence Peter, the creator of the Peter Principle, said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up someplace else.”
In this installment of our series of interviews with Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, Global Partners, Inc. discusses how the Cleveland Clinic sees innovation and measures its value, both to the Clinic as well as to the patients it serves.
The Cleveland Clinic is an unquestionable leader in healthcare innovation. We think that all organizations can benefit by understanding how the Cleveland Clinic has created a culture of discipline for innovation. None of us want to end up someplace else.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: Do you have an R&D group within Cleveland Clinic, a so called R&D or an innovation center?
DR. COSGROVE: Yes, we do. Cleveland Clinic Innovations is essentially a tech transfer group. It’s interesting what has happened. The flow of money has gone gradually from devices and pharmaceuticals to IT.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What are some of the results?
DR. COSGROVE: We’ve seen it spin off to the creation of about 35 companies, and the spin offs are increasingly IT solutions to healthcare problems. So we are able to see and measure results from our internal developments for our operations and our patients.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: How do you put in place a process so that innovations are sustainable?
DR. COSGROVE: We do two things. We’ve established Foundation Medical Partners. It is now a standalone group venture capital fund. The Cleveland Clinic serves as the anchor tenant for investments and provides advice from the doctors. And the second one is the tech transfer which is called Innovations.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: How do you quantify the return on investment (ROI)?
DR. COSGROVE: This group has gotten about 270 patents issued and about 35 companies spun off and we’re now doing profitable tech transfer for other medical groups around the country. But it’s taken us about 10 years to get it to where it is now.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: Do you have any advice for other healthcare companies who are pursuing innovation within their organizations?
DR. COSGROVE: Just like a start up, it takes a long time to get innovation within companies off the ground, but, with the right structure and investment strategy, it gathers momentum and, if you diversify and place an emphasis behind the areas generating real returns, the percentages can be nice.
These insights from Dr. Toby Cosgrove can provide tremendous help to any business, not only in terms of benefiting your own business, but also in terms of adding value for your customers.
The importance of establishing a realistic process for creating new innovations, and one that
can quantitatively measure the ROI of these fresh ideas, cannot be overstated.
We would be interested to hear how your organization tracks its ROI on innovation. How does
the Cleveland Clinic’s approach to innovation provide worthwhile ideas for your company?
image credit: time_anchor
Posted on Tue, Dec 06, 2011 @ 08:50 AM
Global Partners, Inc. (GPI) was fortunate to spend time last month with Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic. In our effort to help healthcare companies be leaders in their categories, we believe it is important to listen to the innovations and ideas of those who have accomplished so much. The Cleveland Clinic and Dr. Cosgrove certainly fall into that category.
In this interview, we talked with Dr. Cosgrove about the Cleveland Clinic’s innovations in E-health.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: The Cleveland Clinic is taking a leadership role in technology so let’s talk about either M-health or E-health.
DR. COSGROVE: Well, let’s talk about the E-health because I think E probably came before M even in the alphabet. We have electronic connections that allow us to examine patients distantly. Almost anything that can be digitized we can do remotely.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: What does that mean in terms of treating patients?
DR. COSGROVE: I think we have 30 some sites that do x-rays including three radiologists. So we can do pathology in Hawaii that can be digitized and people can look at specimens. We can do dermatology, so essentially anything that can be reduced to digits can be looked at in electronic format and done remotely.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: How does that raise the standard of healthcare?
DR. COSGROVE: It is very important, particularly for rural areas. I mean, I think about my hometown, there is no way they are ever going to have a neuropathologist where I grew up. But now, you certainly have access to one. So, there are lots of opportunities along those lines.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: Are you doing these innovations within your organization or are you working in partnerships?
DR. COSGROVE: The things I have talked about we have done ourselves.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: Do you see expanding into partnerships?
DR. COSGROVE: We partnered with Microsoft concerning heart failure patients in the EMR…about 300 patients…but it was really their initiative rather than a partnership. We’re looking into doing other things with Microsoft. We’re trying to have them use their cloud computing or their cloud for storage of our x-rays. That’s been our project.
It’s been about a year working with the idea of storing all our films with them - Apple to Microsoft to Mac and then back from Microsoft to Apple to the end user. And the combination of working with Apple and Microsoft is challenging.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: Do you see that as just one step in the future toward remotely working with patient data on a cloud basis?
DR. COSGROVE: Oh, absolutely, I think that’s where everything is going, especially when you get into the genomics which is going to be a huge data set that is going to be in the cloud.
GLOBAL PARTNERS: So you are happy with the solution. Do you worry about some of the security issues that Washington is raising about the cloud?
DR. COSGROVE: I think the paranoia in Washington is much greater than the reality.
All of us at Global Partners, Inc. get inspired by Dr. Toby Cosgrove. Listening to the innovations the Cleveland Clinic are doing, we’re able to see the future of healthcare a little more clearly. How do you see E-health in the future of your organization?
image credit: williamsalumni
Posted on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 @ 10:23 AM
By: Paul Hesselschwerdt and David Sanderson
Global Partners is beginning a series on the Cleveland Clinic. It is based on a recent interview with Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO. We chose the Cleveland Clinic because we believe it is a role model for best healthcare practices and innovation.
The Cleveland Clinic is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. This multispecialty academic medical center is ranked as one of the top 4 hospitals in the United States by U.S. News & World Report and #1 for cardiac care.
It is apparent to us, early in our discussions with Dr. Cosgrove, that the Cleveland Clinic is much more than one of the nation’s premiere hospitals. It has been, and is, a model for better standards in healthcare in the U.S. and around the world.
Here are 4 ways the Cleveland Clinic serves as a model for hospital and healthcare innovation and why we feel fortunate to be able to talk with Dr. Cosgrove.
- A GREAT HEALTHCARE SYSTEM, LIKE ANY GREAT CORPORATION, STAYS TRUE TO ITS ROOTS: The Cleveland Clinic was founded in 1921 by four physicians on the concept of group practice in medicine which was relatively new at the time. Only the Mayo Clinic and military units were known to follow this model. The vision of the Cleveland Clinic then was “Better care of the sick, investigation of their problems.” Today, with over 36,000 employees and revenues of 4.4 billion dollars, the Cleveland Clinic is ranked among the best hospitals on fifteen specialties. Its excellence is still based on the same adherence to group practice principles as when it was founded.
- THE eCLEVELAND CLINIC “MY CHART” PHR PROVES PATIENTS CAN MANAGE THEIR OWN HEALTHCARE: The ground breaking eCleveland Clinic “MyChart” PHR offers patients '24/7' access to their medical record, the same record the physician sees. Researchers at Cleveland Clinic extracted demographic and usage information on more than 60,000 users proving Personal Health Record use does result in patients better managing their own healthcare.
- A GOOD BUSINESS MODEL HAS TO BE A GOOD HEALTHCARE MODEL: The Cleveland Clinic works so well as a hospital because it works so well as a business. Its doctors are on salary. This eliminates the competition for patients between departments, and the incentive for doctors to perform additional tests and procedures. The system also "drives our quality up," Cosgrove says, because it frees doctors to concentrate on their practices, not the minutiae of running a small business. "Day after day for 30 years I did nothing but fix hearts," he said. "That's how you get good at something."
CORE VALUES OF A GOOD HOSPITAL SYSTEM ARE TRANSFERABLE GLOBALLY: The Clinic announced plans to operate a world-class specialty hospital in Abu Dhabi, UAE, to be built and owned by the UAE government. This facility is scheduled to open late in 2012. The core values of the Cleveland Clinic reflect a physician-led medical facility, served by Western-trained, North American board-certified (or equivalent) physicians. “There is no reason the Cleveland Clinic's core values and competencies cannot be transferred to other parts of the world,” Dr. Cosgrove said. He also indicated plans to expand into other markets abroad including Austria and Singapore.
We believe the Cleveland Clinic, with Dr. Toby Cosgrove as the CEO, is setting the standard for healthcare innovation. Do you?
image credit: Valerie27 and TKCS
Posted on Thu, Jul 21, 2011 @ 08:36 PM
By: David Sanderson
Digital, wireless and mobile innovations are fundamentally changing the way many industries do business. They’ve created new business models for connectivity where speed-to-market, increased productivity, less paperwork, better outcomes and greater profitability are available to those willing to replace the old with the new.
No industry has more potential to realize these benefits than healthcare. For companies who consider the new healthcare paradigm of connectivity, communication pathways are now available to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time with critical advantages.
The benefits of connectivity can be applied to all four segments of the healthcare continuum – Patients, Physicians, Providers and Payors. Here are 5 reasons why the healthcare company with the greatest connectivity wins.
- CONNECTIVITY IS BRINGING TOGETHER UNPRECENTED COLLABORATION: In April, five innovative and leading health systems - Mayo Clinic, Geisinger, Kaiser Permanente, Intermountain Healthcare and Group Health Announce Plan - each of whom are pioneers in the use of electronic medical records (EMR) for their patients, joined together to announce a new initiative to securely exchange electronic health data through a Care Connectivity Consortium. What is significant is that the benefits of connectivity, not outside influences or pressures, brought industry leaders together.
- EVERY HEALTHCARE COMPANY NEEDS AN EMR AND PHR CONNECTIVITY STRATEGY: Healthcare companies are more accountable than ever. Connectivity demonstrates responsiveness to hospitals, clinics, imaging center and laboratories and flexibility to different EMR data specification. When EMR’s connect with PHR’s (Personal Health Records), this allows for the automation and streamlining of the workflow in health care settings and increases safety through evidence-based decision support, quality management, and outcomes reporting. The strength of connectivity affects the number of referrals received from various physicians and the strength of a long term relationship.
- CONNECTIVITY HAS FINANCIAL ADVANTAGES: In one study, Markle estimated financial incentives of approximately $3 to $6 per patient visit or $0.50 to $1.00 per member per month, based on 4,000 patient visits per year or a 2,000 patient panel, as a sufficient starting point to encourage adoption of EMR connectivity technologies for ambulatory services. Estimates represented approximately $7 - $14 billion per year for three years or 1.2% to 2.4% of the total amount spent on ambulatory care. Connectivity also present significant financial advantages in reducing preventable readmissions where the American Hospital Association reports up to 19% of hospital stays are readmissions within 30 days of discharges resulting in $17 billion in medical costs annually.
CONNECTIVITY ACHIEVES GREATER PATIENT CARE AND BUSINESS PROFITABILY: Doctors and nurses are starting to transition from clipboards to tablets and they’re taking advantage of the medical device applications available. Once the application is developed and the proper network infrastructure is put in place, hardware costs come down as well as space requirements. No longer do you need to find space in a tight patient room. A tablet can rest in the physicians hand and takes way less room then a computer. If a tablet goes down, you hand the doctor or nurse another one. No more downtime of expensive critical computers. This is so much easier to maintain then computers all over. - MEDICAL CONNECTIVITY IS MOVING TO MOBILE CONNECTIVITY: Smart phone and tablets are changing business delivery and the major manufacturers, particularly Apple, are targeting healthcare. Just to give you one example, an iPhone can now be used as a: 1) Virtualized medical device, 2) a sensor gateway to measure vital signs and 3) a point of care computing device.
From Payor to Provider to Physician to Patient, connectivity is now a foundational strategic point of difference for any healthcare company to leverage for business growth.
For over 20 years, we’ve worked in partnership roles with global companies. If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is to start with models that can make businesses grow. In healthcare, we believe the new paradigm is connectivity.
Would you agree with us?
image credit: tribehut
Posted on Thu, Jul 29, 2010 @ 03:20 PM
By: David Sanderson
Mobile health technologies have been making headway for some time now. In recent years, faced with increasing medical costs and limited resources, patients have been presented with at-home patient monitoring devices. These devices can address many of the problems doctors, patients, and insurers are faced with today.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Aetna estimates 40% of readmission rates are avoidable – admission for a hospital stay can cost upwards of $6,000 while at-home heart monitoring devices cost around $600. They also reported on how a study of a new cardiac monitoring sensor used a wireless transmitter that “…resulted in a 30% reduction in hospitalization for heart-failure patients.”
Cutting costs and increasing the quality of patient care are clearly high priorities for the healthcare industry. Both of these can be addressed through the use of these kinds of portable medical devices.
Feel free to read the full WSJ article.
Posted on Wed, Feb 10, 2010 @ 10:45 AM
Mobile Health is
About to Explode But
Key Challenges Remain
Global Partners Prinicipals
Today in the U.S., 45% of the population (133 million) suffers from at least one chronic disease, and they account for 75% of the $1.7 trillion spent on healthcare today. Importantly, two-thirds of adults over 65 have multiple chronic health conditions, and this is the age group least familiar with the internet.
On a personal level, almost everyone knows someone with a chronic disease. Most likely it is a form of diabetes, asthma or congestive heart problems, the three most common chronic illnesses. When chronic disease directly affects someone or involves a friend or relative, people naturally worry as they become acutely aware of their vulnerabilities, yet feel that they cannot spend the time constantly monitoring their state of health. Instead, the natural tendency is to have frequent check-ups and to contact a physician whenever there is some kind of "red flag" or unusual symptom arising.
But often it is too late!
Fortunately, these concerns and risks may soon become passé. The omnipresence of the internet has contributed to phenomenal advancements in remote health monitoring and communications, also known as‘ mHeath', among patients and healthcare professionals - physicians, nurses, providers/insurance carriers, payers and other healthcare administrators. While the technology for mHeath devices has progressed to the point where the ease of adaptation and use should no longer be an issue, major challenges remain, especially involving behavioral changes. And senior citizens who have the highest incidence of multiple chronic diseases are typically the most reluctant to change (by 2030, about 71.5 million will be over 65, compared to 37 million in 2006).
Read On...
Jay Gronlund is a Principal at Global Partners who focuses in the areas of brand development, new product launch and marketing in emerging economies. For more information, interested readers can contact Jay at jgronlund@globalpartnersinc.com
David Sanderson is a Principal at Global Partners who focuses in areas at the intersection of technology, consumer products and healthcare. David has over 20 years of international management experience with Global consumer product leaders such as Reebok, technology leaders such as ST Microelectronics and Healthcare leaders such as MedApps. For more information, interested readers can contact Dave at dsanderson@globalpartnersinc.com