Today change is happening faster than ever. But if there’s one sector resistant to rushing the process, it’s without a doubt healthcare. Perhaps you have felt this tension in YOUR healthcare projects? Read on to explore why and discover ideas, tools, and insights to help you fuel inspirational discussions within your project teams. This is the third article in a four-part series. Today we will explore the healthcare sector. If you’d like to hear more about the Analysis Paralysis in Workplace Decisions or The Not-So-Hidden Culprits Behind Approval Bottlenecks in Education please check out our article from last week, or stay tuned for our article on the hospitality sector next week.
In this article, we delve into the health and wellness sector, drawing from six months of research with decision makers for the built environment from hundreds of companies, including Johns Hopkins, Lurie’s Children’s Hospital, the VA, and several behavioral health institutions. Despite the focus, the insights shared are valuable across various sectors, offering lessons that extend beyond healthcare. This new research stems from a Design Hackathon, ThinkLab’s biggest research project of the year. This year, the topic was the future of customer decision making. While fascinating research from Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey and others cover the broader B2B world, ThinkLab data shares unique nuances of decisions specific to OUR industry.
But we don’t stop there. The goal of our research is to provide tools to drive conversations with your project teams as well as insights about how product and service partners can respond in new and innovative ways.
One Word to Describe the Changes in Decision-Making for Healthcare Projects
To kick off our exploration, we asked our healthcare research participants to share one word describing how the decision-making process has changed in recent years. Their responses were revealing:
- Streamlined: “I’m really trying hard to focus on what we really need. I can’t have outliers affecting our decision-making.”
- Evolving: “We have a new parent company due to the rapid evolution of acquisitions happening in the healthcare realm. The levels of approval and where they come from have really shifted.”
- Standardization: “Our leadership thinks this will ease our pain, but until we fix this process, it won’t.”
- Roller Coaster: “We’ve been given the directive to do standards, but our budgets have been cut, so we aren’t able to execute.”
Quicksand: “There’s incredible variation in project size, volume, and bureaucracy to get the long, slow projects to come to fruition.”
Today, large healthcare projects, often spanning multiple years, face significant challenges due to rapid changes in costs, materials, and decision-making personnel.
Where there is pain, there’s opportunity. So, where’s the opportunity?
Our talented data visualizers at ThinkLab created a heat map showing where each vertical feels the most pain. In healthcare, the pain was evenly spread across all phases of the project process, unlike any other sector. This “peanut buttered” pain indicates significant opportunities for positive change. Here are the top three issues causing pain in healthcare projects:
- Finding the Right Partners that “Get it.”: Healthcare projects require partners who truly understand the unique requirements of the sector, from behavioral health safety to hospital cleanliness standards. Internal design teams often struggle to find external partners who can meet these specific needs. This applies to both design partners and product suppliers, as well as contractors who must adhere to strict health and safety protocols. More than any other sector, we heard complaints about partners today missing things that they would have caught in the past.
An Increased Number of Decision Makers: Like other sectors, we are seeing more decision makers are involved in healthcare projects than ever before. ThinkLab data suggests that the average decision-making committee has doubled. This complexity, while necessary, adds to the difficulty of reaching consensus. Unlike other sectors who often see more decision makers simply due to higher costs and more risk, the involvement of multiple specialists in healthcare, such as infectious disease experts, IT professionals, and brand managers, is crucial in healthcare.
- Conflicting Stakeholder Perspectives: Conflicting priorities among stakeholders often lead to what we’ll call “buyer’s remorse.” In healthcare, this includes not only the internal teams driving the design projects, but also physicians and patients. The sector experienced notably more pain during the move-in and implementation phases than any other sector. This is because we heard often that stakeholders who were not involved in the initial design meetings are surprised by the end result, leading to dissatisfaction and the need for last-minute changes.[Text Wrapping Break]
So, how do we seize this opportunity with our healthcare clients?
To address these challenges, ThinkLab’s hackathon brought together thought leaders across commercial real estate, the A&D community, manufacturers, dealers, developers and more to “hack this challenge” with new ideas in three different cities; Chicago, New York, and Atlanta, which we share in detail through our podcast.[Text Wrapping Break][Text Wrapping Break]If you’re interested in learning more -or hearing quotes directly from the source- we invite you to listen in to the full episode, The Paradox of an Un-rushable Process in Fast Times wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll hear more on our episode focused on hospitality next week, or you can always go back and check out our episode on the Understanding the Analysis Paralysis in Workplace Decisions or The Not-So-Hidden Culprits Behind Approval Bottlenecks. Happy listening!