the introduction to this section, from its inception GHX has been faced with a Gordian knot— so many intertwined and dependent challenges that it can feel unsolvable. But GHX stepped into the complexity of the US healthcare system, and into other geographies as well. In doing so, it has created the space for customers, competitors, suppliers, and others in the industry to come together and collaborate on solutions. By bringing these diverse market views together, GHX has been able to continually redefine its edge of disruption and solve some of the most complex problems in the cost of healthcare. GHX has done this by being willing to take intelligent risks that are grounded in a core belief in the value of co-creating with its customers and its market.
CO-CREATE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS AND YOUR MARKET
Henry Ford reportedly once said that “coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” If you buy into that, co-creating with your customers and your market to learn about your edge of disruption and establish your point of view is the ultimate measure of success. In our experience, no one does this better than GHX. As its success confirms, engaging your customers and your market in co-creating—both in defining and solving for your edge of disruption—creates tremendous respect for your ability to bring people together around interesting challenges. And you often fast-track the sales process later on, because people are primed to buy solutions they helped to build. Working together to solve systemic problems creates more value for everyone—you, your customers, their customers, your competitors, and the industry as a whole. Starting this early by co-creating possible solutions with outsiders gives you the ability to create solutions that matter more than any that the participants can accomplish individually, and being the company that creates the space for co-creation gives you the strongest position for maximizing your value contribution.
Think back to what we’ve shared about GHX. It occupies a unique place in healthcare as a company that was created by five competitors and originally chartered to fill a very specific need. By its very founding, GHX was placed in the middle of its market, and it had to negotiate, partner, cajole, convince, and, yes, even push others in the industry to join in what was at the time a bit of an experiment in e-commerce. Over the years, this position has helped GHX to find a confident position as a convener of ideas, a place where its customers and the rest of the market can come together to co-create solutions to some of the most difficult challenges in healthcare today.
But it wasn’t always a given that GHX would have the ability to effectively co-create with its customers and its market. It had some significant obstacles to overcome, including building trust among competitors and between suppliers and buyers, protecting its neutrality in the process, and convincing the industry that GHX had the capability and the influence to effectively create a collaborative space. You may encounter some of these obstacles as well. It can be scary to go out to customers or others and actually not have answers to the big problems, but what GHX has learned is that by asking the right questions, you demonstrate your strength and the value of your involvement, and you wind up with better solutions. Knowing what questions to ask and what solutions to invite your customers and your market into solving will enhance your reputation as an organization that matters more, because you will be creating more value for the industry, for your customers, and for yourself.
Knowing what questions to ask and what solutions to invite your customers and your market into solving will enhance your reputation as an organization that matters more, because you will be creating more value for the industry, for your customers, and for yourself.
Earlier in this section we mentioned the challenges related to tracking implantables. There were plenty of questions to ask, and even more solutions to explore for this problem. As we talked with GHX’s Karen Conway, executive director, industry relations, and Margot Drees, VP of global strategy, about the evolution of the industry discussions, they highlighted three important outcomes from the process of co-creation.2 First, GHX gained traction for the development of its own part of the solution. Second, by driving industry alignment, GHX had better visibility into the larger problem and how it could help add more value. Third, and related to product development, was a significant lesson from the process of co-creating with the market. It might seem counterintuitive, but this lesson is all about going broad and ambitious for a moment, and then narrowing your focus to a solvable piece to deliver that makes progress against the bigger challenge. Let’s take a closer look.
In 2010 GHX started internally discussing the opportunity related to tracking medical devices, and in 2011 it invited its partners in the industry to begin the hard work of defining and learning about this new edge of disruption. In bringing all the right people together and fully appreciating the breadth of the problem, GHX was able to drive the creation of an exciting and creative demonstration of what “could be” for implantables. After two years of active and engaged debate, argument, consideration, and creation, and dedicated facilitation from GHX, the coalition working on the problem committed to building a demo for what they believed was possible—from an optimistic and curious position that challenged many assumptions being made in the industry about implantables.
They brought this demo to the GHX Supply Chain Summit in 2013 in the form of a site at the event set up to resemble an operating room, where they demonstrated how use of implantables in the scenario could be tracked and recorded for appropriate and timely billing, as well as to support patient notification. It was a big moment that really highlighted the success of the co-creation in defining the desired end state in a way that no single organization could have accomplished—all enabled by the discussions GHX prompted by going out to the market and saying, “Let’s solve for this.”
After the summit, stakeholders were eager to move forward on provisioning the whole solution. The insights generated from the co-creative process were enough to pique serious interest from influencers and buyers across the sector. This is just the type of access an elevated perspective creates, something we will dedicate an entire chapter to in the “Elevated Relationships” section. GHX was positioned to offer an even more powerful perspective on what could and could not be achieved in this space. But there was also a sobering realization: The “ideal” solution developed and showcased at the summit would be difficult to replicate in delivery because it required extensive technology, process, and behavior change from every single person end to end, including physicians and other highly specialized, highly trained people involved in the surgical processes. Coordinating all of this change at the same time simply would not be possible.
Armed with this refined perspective, GHX took a step back and reevaluated what would be the best edge of disruption to tackle first, now that the full problem set was defined. In the spirit of progress, in 2014 GHX decided to focus narrowly on AOM, Advanced Order Management, as a first step in solving for tracking implantables. Because the whole industry fully understood both the problem and the larger solution, solving for a piece of it became meaningful and important. Without that shared understanding, generated through the co-creation process, solving just a piece of the problem would have been out of context and potentially meaningless in advancing the industry toward the desired end state.
The result? Today AOM is improving accuracy and reducing invoice problems, and providing greater visibility than ever to implantables spend and use. It does this by automating many of the steps involved in managing implantables, from requisition to electronic purchase order creation. In the process, visibility of which implantables are being purchased and consumed becomes available. AOM tackles the first set of problems in the medical device supply chain that will move the industry toward the desired end state that everyone has co-created through the collaborative process. If GHX had not co-created with its market, it very likely could have developed a product that only solved for a tiny and potentially obsolete part of the problem. Because its leaders took the time to step back and invite others in, the solution fits today’s realities and tomorrow’s vision of an industry-wide, seamless integration of implantables management into the healthcare system, improving both costs and patient experience and safety.
Refining
