Technology Should Give Clinicians Their Time Back

Kathy Azeez Narain spent years at American Express before she came to healthcare. She sees industries by what sits at their core. Apple, she told me, is a product company. American Express is a service and experience business. Healthcare is something else.

"Healthcare is a human-centric business. It's not about just experience. There's a lot of emotion to unpack in healthcare."

That observation, shared during our Belonging and Retention season when she was Hoag's chief digital and customer innovation officer, shaped how she thinks about technology. It is a useful lens for any leader making digital decisions right now.

Quality of time, not minutes

Much of the conversation about healthcare technology focuses on efficiency: faster scheduling, shorter visits, more patients per day. Kathy argued that the quality of time matters more than the number of minutes. A focused ten-minute conversation where you feel heard can be worth more than a distracted forty.

Patients, she noted, never rate their care on the technology. They rate it on whether the doctor looked at them or spent the visit looking at a screen. In too many exam rooms, the computer has become a third person in the room.

I shared my own experience. My mother has been recovering from a stroke, and very few of the physicians took the time to really look at her. For someone like her, one minute of eye contact is enough to know she matters.

So Kathy's test for technology is whether it gives doctors and nurses time back with patients. She wants to give the physician a digital companion, the way patients have their phones, so that when two humans meet, the focus is on the person in front of them.

A dear friend of mine, an oncologist, put it in words I have never forgotten: we need to stop seeing a cancer patient and start seeing an individual who happens to have cancer. Technology should help clinicians do exactly that.

The nurse who wasn't ready to stop caring

When Kathy had her daughter at Hoag, her labor and delivery nurse had more than 30 years of experience and had delivered thousands of babies. She was about to retire. She told Kathy she would gladly answer new mothers' questions online for a couple of hours a day. She wasn't retiring from caring. She was retiring from the version of the role she had today.

That story captures what technology at its best can do. It doesn't replace human care. It extends it. Decades of experience didn't have to walk out the door. But the way healthcare is set up, that option didn't exist. Kathy wants to change that.

Kathy applied the same thinking when she took over Hoag's marketing organization. She found it was really a communications function with little data behind it, so she rebuilt the team. The insight that guided her was that the physician is the product. Patients don't choose a hospital for its hallways. They choose it for the doctor they trust with their mother's life. So the stories became about what physicians actually do for people.

Regulation is not a reason

When Kathy joined Hoag, she asked a lot of why questions. The answers were often the same: it's a law, it's a regulation. She wrote them down in a notebook. Then she found an expert in healthcare law in her own network and went through them one by one. Many of the rules were written long ago and didn't apply the way people assumed. New employees simply inherited the blanket statements, and the questions stopped there.

"To this day, I don't think I've used any regulation as a reason we can't do something."

She still keeps that notebook. At the end of each year she reads back through it and asks herself whether she added value to the world that year.

I had a similar exchange with a chief strategy officer who asked how anyone could personalize leadership in an industry so heavily regulated. I asked him where the regulation was for how we treat people. Rules matter, but they are rarely the real barrier. Habits are.

Questions for leaders adopting new tools

• Will this technology give clinicians more time with patients, or less?
• How will you know whether it improves the quality of an interaction, not just its speed?
• Whose experience could technology help you keep connected to your organization?
• When someone says a rule makes something impossible, who checks whether that is true?

Kathy believes transformation fails when it becomes one executive's job. It succeeds when every leader can explain the strategy the same way. She is building flexible pieces she calls a mosaic, rather than locking into any tool for 20 years. And she is honest that the future will be uncomfortable. "If you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning anything."

You can watch my full conversation with Kathy in Leading with Humanity and Innovation, part of the Belonging and Retention season.

The best technology is often the kind people barely notice, because it gives them back the moments that matter.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.