Resistance is the start of the conversation: Montefiore’s Deepesh Chandra on leading change in healthcare

In this episode of Catalyst, Tammy is joined by Deepesh Chandra, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Montefiore Einstein, one of New York’s most mission-driven health systems. Deepesh has spent more than 20 years in healthcare and technology, with stops at McKinsey, Mount Sinai and Bon Secours Mercy Health. He started out believing technological change was an engineering problem, but came to realize that the hardest part of the project was actually the people. Tammy and Deepesh dig into starting with the human constraint rather than the technology’s capability, bringing patients and clinicians in from day one and why resistance is where collective problem-solving begins.

Highlights from the episode include:

• Human in the loop isn’t automatically a safety net. A person who simply clicks “approve” can’t catch what a fast-moving system gets wrong, and the safety they provide may be an illusion. For patient decisions in healthcare, human judgment must always remain. Tammy and Deepesh agree a shift in language might be needed from human in the loop to human in control.
• Give people agency, but still choose a direction. People resist transformation done to them far more than transformation designed with them. At the same time, large moves can’t be driven by consensus alone. The leadership challenge is creating enough agency for people to help shape the change while holding enough conviction that the organization really is transforming.
• Start with the human constraint, not the technology’s capability. The internet, mobile and social media all saw technology pushed onto users because of what it could do. Deepesh flips the equation: find where workflows are constrained, where patients hit friction and where clinicians are burned out by administrative work. Then work backward to the solutions that can help. Sometimes the most human-centered move is redesigning the workflow entirely.

Check out the full episode to learn more about the MS-DOS-to-Windows project that taught Deepesh his first lesson in change management, and the “second brain” he’s building for himself.

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Please note that the views expressed in this episode may not necessarily be those of NTT DATA.