During my maternity leave, I made two new friends: Drew and Jonathan Scott — or as they are more commonly known, the Property Brothers (a show featured on HGTV).
On the show, Drew and Jonathan help couples transform fixer-uppers into their dream home. What they often find, however, is that most buyers have no desire to participate in any renovation and, in fact, would prefer to purchase a home that already has the features they’re looking for, such as an open concept and a modern kitchen. So as part of their tactic, the Property Brothers take the couple to a ready-made dream house, and then shatter those dreams by revealing the high price tag. But just because you can’t buy the home you’ve always wanted, it doesn’t mean you can’t create it, they’ll say.
The idea of putting money down on a house that is outdated, run-down, or just plain ugly, and then spending weeks tearing out carpet and painting is often a tough sell. Why? Not because people don’t want to strive for something better, but because we’ve been conditioned to believe that the perfect house is something that already has everything on our wish list, from top-of-the-line appliances to hardwood floors.
But despite their initial concerns, every couple eventually sees the benefit of creating their own dream house and is pleased with the end result (unless there’s some footage on the cutting room floor that proves otherwise) — even though it involves much more work than just slapping down a big chunk of change on a finished home.
“Keep an open mind,” the Property Brothers always say. “Don’t see this house as it is now, but as what it can be.”
It reminded me of an interview I did back in May with Mark Hulse, CIO at Moffitt Cancer Center. One of Moffitt’s key initiatives is Total Cancer Care, a comprehensive approach to treatment in which data is pulled from various sources to help develop individualized patient care plans. To facilitate this, Moffitt needed to create a repository that could house vast amounts of data and enable clinicians and researchers to quickly pull the information they needed to perform queries and run analytics.
Moffitt’s leaders knew what they wanted — the problem is, a solution didn’t exist that met all of their needs (or if it did, it was out of their budget). So they asked the key stakeholders, “What kind of system will you need five to seven years from now?” and based on that, created a request for concept.
Hulse and his team formulated a number of different use cases and scenarios, put it together “in kind of a comprehensive vision,” and sent it out to about seven vendors. “We asked them how they would work with us to help realize this vision,” he said.
But instead of choosing one vendor, Moffitt cultivated a four-way partnership with Oracle, Deloitte, and TransMed to create the Health and Research Informatics Platform, which went live last fall. So far, the product has delivered. “Before we did this, if there was a clinical trial and researchers wanted to know how many patients at Moffitt would be eligible, it could take up to a month to comb through all the data,” Hulse noted. “Now, it literally takes a few minutes.”
Moffitt’s leaders didn’t take the easy road, but they got what they needed. Of course, there are always going to be times when the solution an organization needs already exists. But when it doesn’t, CIOs need to keep an open mind.
As more organizations look to take data analytics to the next level, leaders may find that partnering with vendors to develop a solution that meets their needs is a better option than shelling out big bucks for a ready-made product. “We were looking for potential partners that really shared that vision — not only in terms of, ‘sure, we have a product that will do what you want to be able to do,’ but more importantly, ‘we understand the future that Moffitt wants to step into and it’s very much aligned with our strategy,’” said Hulse. “I think as we look to really doing true transformation in the healthcare industry, it really is going to take a combination of these public and private partnerships to be able to think very differently and to be able to look at this in a very coherent and sort of neutrally beneficial way.”
Taking the route that Moffitt did requires a lot of time and a lot of work. But if getting your hands dirty means that, in the end, your organization gets its dream house, and then it’s all worth it.
Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.