Bill Russell

The Future of Healthcare is shaped by technology but moves at the pace of policy, incentives and culture.

The healthcare sector only gets part-time attention from CEOs at big tech firms. We're hearing that the health initiatives are scattered across the organization so they lack focus. They lack a cohesive enterprise strategy around healthcare.

The theme in 2018 and 2019 was to establish market essentiality. Get bigger. Get to scale. There's this belief that if we get to scale we're going to be able to do things that other health systems can’t do. And we're going to be able to weather the storms. And that did play out during the pandemic.

When I came into healthcare as a CIO, I had to sit down for eight hours straight with some of the smartest people in the room just to understand pricing. I realized there’s no way the average American can understand pricing and what they're getting themselves into when they walk into the hospital. I still believe that's true today. But I also believe it's a problem we can and should be able to solve.

One of the problems in healthcare is elasticity of demand. We learned this in economics. When you increase pricing demand goes down and when you decrease pricing demand goes up. The reality in healthcare is that there is no elasticity. You can raise the price forever but we're still going to that hospital. You can lower the price and it's not going to increase. So it doesn't respond to normal market demands.