I will never un-see the waste of time and trust inflicted on patients by a system obsessed with its check boxes instead of people. Worse - most of the torture inflicted on patients and clinicians is driving up total cost of care, not saving money.

One of the benefits of 30 years in the industry is that I know to whom and how to complain.

In the process of reaching out for help, I’ve also increasingly been holding up a mirror to systemic failings. It’s been a learning experience.

Those who have been kind enough to listen as I explained the full patient experience of one of their processes have been horrified and embarrassed.

Horrified works for me. I want these stories to spur action. “For the good of the patient” is the single most motivating force for change throughout healthcare. Finding those who are helping me and investing the extra time and political capital it takes to move others to action, reminds me that human caring still exists in healthcare.

Embarrassed is not the point. No one I’m talking with designed the system that’s causing me a problem. They’re just carrying it forward thinking they’re doing their job.

Healthcare institutions are hard coding and scaling miserable experience, not just for the patient but also for the people who are dedicating their careers to trying to help patients.

Once you accept this reality and drop the habit of defending the broken processes and self-serving justifications, it’s not that hard to imagine, plan, and execute something that works better and puts people at the heart of healthcare.

I started Adapt. Adopt. Accelerate. because I saw a huge gap in the knowledge of how to make transformative, scary changes happen in healthcare. We know what needs doing. We have a really hard time executing it at scale.

Making healthcare work for patients is something we can do today despite the wonky financial incentives, disjointed computer systems, and horrible fragmentation.

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All it takes is a perspective shift. Look at a process that you do every day and think how you could make it better for the patient while still being compliant?

Delight your patients or members - don’t just check the boxes. It makes such a difference!

The nurse who gave me parking vouchers because someone in a different department made me wait an extra 1.5 hours sticks in my mind much more positively than the nurse who told me the 1h 20 min video she dumped on me had helped the nurses save in-person training time.

Giving me parking vouchers didn’t even require a process shift or buy-in from others. Now imagine the scale of impact if the nurses who designed a training video had started with how we make it most helpful and time efficient for the patients rather than themselves???

There is even an insurance executive who is using my stories to educate her leadership and motivate her team to restructure key processes and reduce the problems I encountered.

When we looked at the full stakeholder picture - who must change, what they control, what’s in it for them, she could see that the flawed processes drive up costs for the payer not just total cost that might land on someone else’s budget.

This systematic thinking reveals how to design changes that actually stick - not because you forced compliance, but because you aligned everyone’s interests around serving patients better. That’s how you turn good intentions into scalable transformation that improves patient experience.

Watching her do this work gives me hope.

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Join us. What process or even small piece of process can you tackle tomorrow? Share your ideas below. Inspire others. Be the difference!

My answer was Yes, individuals care! … But.

Everyone I know - executives and frontline - who chose healthcare for a career, did so to help people. Like any group, there are some bad apples, but the vast majority are in the work to do good.

The single most powerful force for changing healthcare is to explain how a given product or program will benefit their patients. 30+ years and 40+ new products, I’ve never seen “patient good” fail to motivate a change lift.

The problem is that the Complexity⁵⁺ of the system creates a tyranny of policies and procedures, ensuring the patient rarely feels the effects of my friends’ good intentions and hard work. The defacto rule in healthcare is never let the patient or the practical interfere with the protocol.

Doing a good job means complying with an endless list of policies and protocols that have nothing to do with helping patients and everything to do with keeping your job or getting promoted. This is failure of execution, not intention.

“Patient centered” ends up meaning you through put the patient efficiently without annoying any of your colleagues. I’ve long suspected no one would notice if the patient became a widget as long as all the boxes were checked. This is a macro/systemic problem far more than an individual executive or frontline team member’s attitude.

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Over and over, I see healthcare professionals wincing with guilt when they realize the patient experience of something they do as standard practice. When 80% of your workforce experiences burnout, part of it stems from this daily disconnect between why they entered healthcare and what the system forces them to do.

I’m guilty too. After years of being involved in clinical trial planning for new products, I became a trial patient. Who knew that having the insurance company cover “normal and customary care” costs resulted an increase in out-of-pocket costs for the patient already volunteering huge amounts of precious time and taking on some clinical risk? ☹

Good intentions and doing your job are not enough when, as the United States of Care research shows, people believe the system is driven by profit and corporate greed, not care. The fear of cost is so strong that people avoid care even before they know what the bill will be. They don’t feel seen, understood, or listened to by the institutions meant to help them. Across every demographic group: “I don’t trust health care to be there when I need it.”

This isn’t just a moral crisis—it’s a business crisis. When 17% of insured adults delay or avoid care, that’s revenue walking out the door. When patients lose trust, they turn to online influencers and AI tools instead of your health system. This breakdown between intention and lived experience risks lives not just revenue.

Melinda Turner MD offered some practical ways emergency medicine teams can help build a world where the more effective and humane choice is the easy choice. What is a process change your team could make to improve the experience of patients in your care?

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The real cost driver?
A rigid, tangled mess of processes that turn basic care into multi-step odysseys.
Drag not greed.

Even integrated systems get trapped. My mother-in-law has landed in the ER more than once because Kaiser couldn’t coordinate a same-day appointment. Nobody benefits from that — not the patient, not the system, not the budget.
Yet the machine grinds forward, because silos and processes outrank common sense.

This isn’t bad intent.
It’s bad execution and brittle systems.
Healthcare is full of people trying to do the right thing.
They’re just doing it inside workflows built like concrete mazes.

Bad news: You can’t solve the healthcare cost crisis by naming a villain or passing one policy.
Good news: Every team, every organization, can start shrinking waste tomorrow.

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Reducing waste is critical to mission and margin!
1 in 3 U.S. adults delays care due to cost.
When care is delayed, it’s more expensive later — driving the cycle.
Meanwhile, 25–30% of healthcare spending disappears into administrative friction and silo-induced waste such this California analysis of where their 25-30% went.

That’s money that could go to care, tech that works, or hiring the people we actually need at the bedside. Instead, it funds process glue.

Waste isn’t destiny — it’s a procedural choice.
And smart teams are already proving it. A group of nurses started the Get Rid of Stupid Stuff (GROSS) initiative, and it spread so far the AMA built a toolkit around it.

Imagine the margin and morale you unlock when you kill pointless steps.

You don’t need CEO authority.
You need clarity, courage, and one broken workflow to challenge.

Here’s your challenge this week:
Name one unnecessary cost or hassle you see every day and the first step you’ll take to eliminate it.
Then tell us: What would you do with those freed-up dollars, time, or energy?

Drop your answer below 👇
Let’s build more human care … one friction fight at a time.

Despite billions spent, too many solutions never scale past pilots. The problem is adoption not intention.

That’s my focus.

I bring 25+ years driving change across 40+ healthcare solutions plus 20+ years living inside the system as a cancer patient. That rare holistic lens helps me spot healthcare’s antibodies to change that quietly kill transformation before it can scale.

Your first takeaway: When you subscribe, you’ll get my Stakeholder Δ Analysis framework, a way to rethink adoption planning by mapping who must change, how hard those changes will be, and how to support the people doing the heavy lifting of transformation.

Is this you?

• A senior executive tired of initiatives that don’t stick

• A leader balancing strategy with daily firefighting

• An innovator frustrated by pilotitis

• Someone who knows patients deserve to be stakeholders, not widgets

Together, we’ll tackle three essentials for making change stick:

1. Fix the process problem
   Why change management adds work instead of traction, and what works instead

2. Align people you can’t control
   Lead transformation across silos when stakeholders are outside your authority

3. Treat patients as partners
   Design adoption and consumer experience with patients as stakeholders, not widgets

Because the future of healthcare won’t be decided by what we intend to do, but by what we can actually adopt at scale.

Engage – don’t just read. Push back. Share what’s worked in your world. Test these tools with your teams. That’s how we’ll build the execution muscle healthcare needs.

Join me in building the healthcare system our friends and families deserve - Subscribe.

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Help build momentum. Share this with the teams you count on for execution. Transformation doesn’t happen in silos.

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