Article by Jason Free, HIT Leaders & News
CARROLLTON, Georgia, Oct. 12, 2015 — It goes without saying that the past several years in healthcare have been, to put it mildly, chaotic. Emerging technologies, new government regulations and rising patient expectations are just the most obvious culprits of the chaos and the uncertainty that have gripped our industry. While some may say we have experienced a convergence of issues beyond our control – we see this as a reactive mindset – it could be argued that the chief reason behind our seemingly constant struggles is due to a lack of leadership.
Rather than being proactive during this time of uncertainty, many politicians, administrators, executives and clinicians have been using every ounce of their energies reacting to events that they claim could not be predicted or dealt with in a deliberate fashion ahead of time. Thankfully, a handful of organizations within our community are now taking their rightful places in our industry as learned guides who read events, connect stakeholders and share information so that proactive decision making, not reactionary reflexes, has the opportunity to impact our shared journey into the unknown future.
One example of such a forward-thinking company is Greenway Health, an organization with a rich past and an expansive vision of its future. To more thoroughly explore this dynamic company, we will create a series of special features that, upon conclusion, will serve as a portfolio of perspectives comprising “The Voices of Greenway Health.” Our aim with this series is not only to describe the philosophy and goals of Greenway Health in vivid detail. We also hope to encourage other members of our industry to follow their example by actively embracing the opportunity to lead the changes in healthcare instead of remaining passive and reacting to the changes in healthcare.
History
Like most companies within healthcare today, the history of Greenway Health is not a straight-line story.
Greenway Medical Technologies started as a spinoff from a financially oriented company, and it began with the purpose of improving health and increasing efficiencies in healthcare. Even back then, Tee Green, Greenway Health’s Chief Executive Officer, saw the forces impacting healthcare and he talked about three key drivers in the market that formed the company: electronification, consumerization and improving health.
Greenway Medical Technologies worked along that path until two years ago when it merged with Vitera Healthcare and SuccessEHS to become Greenway Health. When all three companies came together, the executive leadership saw incredible synergies between their combined customer bases, technologies and, most importantly, their vision of leading healthcare into the future. Since then, the company has been pulling together the experiences and insights of their three pasts into a single mission for their new, shared future.
A Refined Vision For The Future Of Healthcare
A key figure in Greenway Health’s current mission is Robin Hackney, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer. With over 20 years of marketing experience, she started her career on the ad agency side. Later, she worked with startups and then she went on to earn an MBA. She spent the bulk of her career at IBM executing just about every kind of marketing role one can imagine including work within IBM’s Smarter Planet initiatives. One of her last responsibilities at the company was in an industry role where she owned healthcare for North America working along side federal, state and local government officials, and, in the process, developing her strong passion for healthcare. Today in her new role at Greenway Health, she is able to apply her vast marketing experience as well as leverage her enthusiasm for improving health.
I had the opportunity to speak with Hackney to learn more about Greenway Health’s recent changes and its exciting plans for the future.
Free: Will you please describe the thought process behind Greenway Health’s new logo?
Anyone who has been through logo development knows that it can be a very arduous process because you can create all kinds of lovely logos that in the end possess no real meaning. In my mind, our new logo really had to have a strategic significance. In order to define what the logo was going to look like, we had to land first on our three pillars of serve, connect and care. We played around with different ideas and then we realized that the other key focal item for us, a differentiator and something that we want to be known for, is the fact that we want to be a guide working with our customers toward the future of healthcare. For the past several years, we took upon the tasks of reviewing and monitoring healthcare practices and trends from a number of perspectives: the patient, the industry, public policy, etc. As we monitored these various viewpoints and their changes, we’ve learned how to interpret them for our partners, and we believe our ability to recognize and to interpret the changing healthcare environment provides tremendous value, not only to patients but the industry as a whole. That destination locator icon, its a commitment to our customer to serve as a guide toward the future of healthcare. So when we combined that [locator icon] with a representation of the three pillars of serve, connect and care, that’s how we landed on the new Greenway Health logo.Robin Hackney
Free: Would you please explain how Greenway Health developed its mission’s three pillars of serve, connect and care?
We’ve spent a lot of time since I have joined Greenway Health talking about what makes us different and what’s important in the market. Those were two critical factors because as I came on, we knew that the combined company didn’t have much of a reputation in the market yet. That was one of the missions that Tee Green, our CEO, charged me with was to help the market get to know us: the new Greenway Health. So I sat down with various people and asked, “Who is Greenway Health? What makes us tick? Where are we going as a company? Where have we been? What are our particular strengths?” I married those answers with outward-facing market data by asking, “Who is our competition? What are their strengths? What do our customers want? Where is the market going?” From a patient perspective, a policy perspective etc. my excellent marketing team and I merged all of those elements together, along with the broader Greenway Health team, and what we realize was that there were three things that really stood out as differentiators for us that were also truly important to the market. One of them is service. That was a really unique thing because the heritage of each of the three companies had a sense of service, not just, “Oh, its on their mission statement on the wall.” Of course everybody has some form of that word in their mission statement right? But, it was ingrained in what they did. Different ways and shapes. So that’s been fun because that makes us stronger because we have different perspectives and different angles on service, but service was a common theme that was really easy to land on.Robin Hackney
Free: Greenway Health’s second pillar, connect, seems to be positioned at the perfect time. Connectivity and interoperability are issues that, as an industry, many stakeholders have been looking at for quite some time, however, it has only been very recently that we have been hearing these terms from patients on a mass scale. Is this shift in the awareness of interoperability issues the reason for Greenway Health’s commitment to connectivity?
During my tenure here at Greenway Health, I have seen the shift so it is a very new thing, but it is something that is, because of our perspective on where we are going, it is something that we had already worked toward. So, in the way that we’ve structured our interoperability engine, we call it Greenway Exchange, and it is really designed to be a hub and spoke model so that we can more efficiently connect to each of those places that providers need to connect to. That allows us to be quicker than the average company that is out there. That was a key focus that we had going in, and so as we saw the tide shift, we saw that this issue was finally becoming important in the marketplace as well. We knew we needed to bring this forward as one of our key pillars because we had already seen it coming and now the market was starting to embrace it.Robin Hackney
Free: The final element of the new slogan is “care”. It seems so obvious, but at the same time, it’s also very nebulous as well.
When it comes to care, you are right. This was perhaps the hardest one to define because there was so many other things that you could try to highlight to appear unique, but when we looked at why we formed the company to begin with and what our motivations were, which was really all about improving care, it was clear that it had to be included as one of our pillars. During this rebranding process, we asked ourselves, “Why is our industry, in terms of providing effective care, in the situation that it is in today?” A lot of it has to do with the aging population and chronic disease which drives up cost which makes it more difficult for people to have access. Therefore, we asked, “What can we do, as a company, to tackle that problem?” We understand that one of the fundamental things around chronic care and chronic conditions is that it is not as simple as you just take a drug, or get a test or have surgery. Chronic care requires habit changes that need to be made in addition to following prescriptions and so forth. We looked at that set of issues and we knew we can help tackle those problems because they are all about the patient provider connection. So we have our tools, our portal and Greenway Link, that help with communication between the patient and the provider. They also provide the necessary visibility to help a provider be proactive as opposed to reactive and, in turn, help the patient to be proactive instead of reactive and coordinate care. We know that if we can help drive that process, then we can save lives and improve care. Let me give you a specific example. As we rolled out this brand, we ran a contest and asked our customers to submit stories. One of the stories that came in was from a cardiologist out in Colorado and they became a Greenway customer about three years ago and they move from paper and, in the course of that transition, just by using our Prime Suite product, in this case, just by using that product, once they got all of their paper records loaded, they identified numerous patients who were behind and you know it was a couple dozen, who were behind on various tests and screenings they needed to have. Well, five of those were patients who needed immediate surgery. So they get them in for the tests. They identified the surgery and, they believe, and we believe, that they saved those lives because they installed Prime Suite. If that doesn’t resonate with the thought of improving care, I don’t know what does.Robin Hackney
Read the full article and hear audio excerpts - Becoming a key guide toward the future of healthcare
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About Greenway Health
Improving health is at the heart of Greenway Health’s work. We connect providers to the right information and insights, at the right place and time, so they can make patient-driven care a reality while navigating the ever-changing healthcare system. Greenway delivers exceptional service through a deep team of clinical, financial, and technology experts committed to innovations that keep people healthier and happier. We partner with over 10,000 organizations and 75,000 progressive providers across more than 40 specialties, which translates into more than 100 million lives that are touched by our solutions. All of Greenway Health’s solutions and services are designed to meet our company-wide goals of serving physicians, connecting the industry, and empowering better care. Whether as a customer, strategic partner, or staff member, we invite you to partner with us to create a smarter healthcare system. For more details, visit www.greenwayhealth.com, call (866) 242-3805 or follow Greenway on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn.
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Greenway Health
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