Northwell Health CEO urges innovation, 'disrupters'
Conference focuses on future of health care
TARRYTOWN -- When Northwell Health, the state's largest health system with 21 hospitals and $9.5 billion in revenue, wanted to see how best to move something delicate from one part of the world to another, it checked out the practices of Tiffany & Co. -- purveyor of the little blue jewel box.
When healthcare systems take on another delicate task -- meeting the needs of millennials as patients and employees for decades to come -- it will require doing things differently as well.
Michael J. Dowling, Northwell Health's president and chief executive, offered those examples as he told an audience of hundreds at Wednesday's "Health Tech '16: Fueling Innovation in Westchester" conference that healthcare must try new things and that people working in it need to be "disrupters" to bring about changes for the better.
Dowling said that can prove to be difficult.
“We're trying to be innovative and creative in a culture of over-regulation in my view," he said.
Northwell Health, formerly North Shore LIJ Health Sysytem, is New York's biggest private employer. Northwell has some 61,000 employees in the state . It has launched its own commercial health insurance plan, started a venture capital investment initiative and is involved in almost 100 joint ventures.
Dowling looked into the crystal ball toward 2030 during his address Wednesday. He said he expects healthcare systems across the country to continue to join together and grow. He also predicted that healthcare will work with companies that never would have been in the picture before.
"We, for example, worked with G.E.," Dowling said. "We worked with JetBlue, and many, many other organizations that traditional healthcare organizations have not spent a lot of time working with."
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Dowling said in an interview that Northwell Health sent a team to Tiffany & Co.'s warehouse and offices to see how Tiffany transported delicate, sensitive items, what its practices and protocols were. Northwell has to transport medical equipment, sometimes between hospitals and sometimes from different parts of the globe.
As for the tech-savvy millennial generation, Dowling spoke in the interview of how when he makes a restaurant reservation, he calls and talks to a person but his children use an app to do it. The question is, he said, "how does that affect healthcare delivery?"
At the conference, Dowling said that in the coming years that hospitals "will be very important," but will largely be "special places for intensive-care patients that can not be treated any place else." He said the bulk of other healthcare services are moving to ambulatory home-care and other places.
Dowling warned if people working in healthcare don't move their organizations into the right place, government may come in to try to do it with over-regulation.
The Westchester County Association hosted the third annual Health Tech conference, where entrepreneurs were to pitch products and get tips from a panel of experts from some of the digital health startup world's players, including Dreamit Health, BioLabs New York, Blueprint Health, and NewYork-Presbyterian Innovation Center, according to a news release.
Conference attendees were also expected to hear from strategists representing IBM Heathcare, Memorial Sloan Kettering, New York-Presbyterian/Lawrence, and others.
The Journal News/lohud was among sponsors of the Westchester County Association event.