At the core of the word hospitality is the word hospital. This is the first of a two part series exploring how leaders in both related industries view the digital revolution and its impact on operations. On October 24, 2016 I moderated a discussion with these industry leaders:
Jolyon Bulley, COO, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) – the Americas, a top hotel system with 5,000 hotels and more than 750,000 rooms across 12 brands.
Bill Peacock, COO, Cleveland Clinic, a leading global healthcare system delivering 5.1 million patient visits a year by 49,000 associates, including many of the world’s top-rated physicians.
Dr. Kevin Churchwell, COO, Boston Children’s Hospital, founded in 1869 and cited as by U.S. News & World Report perennially as America’s #1 Children’s hospital.
Robert Reiss: What excites you most about our digital future?
Bill Peacock: The ability to cultivate mass amounts of data to zero in on cures and new techniques to enhance the speed of healing.
Jolyon Bulley: The capacity to view social listening as a great insight provider, the strengthening of direct booking channels into our hotels, and using our loyalty program as a channel for us to strengthen our brands and our owners’ returns.
Kevin Churchwell: The needs of our patients and our families are always at the center of everything we do, and our digital future promises new ways to bring new therapies to the bedside; innovative new methods of impacting and changing children’s lives.
Reiss: What is your greatest fear with our digital future?
Bulley: The digital and mobile world creating a more direct and instant, but potentially less personal service to our guests.
Churchwell: The worst possibility would be lacking capital to invest in that innovation that will change a child’s life—to have the knowledge and commitment to make a difference, but not the finances.
Peacock: We must never forget the human connection between caregiver and patient, which for generations has been an important part of the experiential element.
Reiss: How are data and analytics changing your business model?
Churchwell: Operationally we are developing predictive models to enhance capacity. Based on analysis of types of patients, what’s happened in the past and how it will affect our bed situation, we can know in advance who will be admitted and when we will reach 90% occupancy. We have invested in clinical programs where we track outcomes for treatments of problems that don’t have an answer. We also track how patients and families are hearing about us, which is increasingly through social media—families are creating their own groups for particular illnesses and they’re communicating about it.
Bulley: We’re using advanced analytics with our customers where we have more than 99 million members in our IHG Rewards Club program, which is the largest loyalty club program in the hospitality industry. Our IHG Rewards Club program is all built upon a platform of earn, redeem, save, and recognition for our customers. This year we launched “Your Rate by IHG Rewards Club” which gives our loyalty customers a discount against any other published rate that may be available online. We also provide special services when they come to our hotels like access to state-of-the-art Wi-Fi and Internet through our IHG Connect Program, which is made available free of charge to our IHG Rewards Club members.
Peacock: In the decade I’ve served at the Clinic I’ve watched our use of data migrate from simple financial tracking, to productivity analysis, to supply chain and logistics oversight. Along the way we’ve integrated those systems with our electronic health record to develop care protocols and drive out variation in how we manage certain cases. To date we’ve developed over 100 of these “care paths” and are aggressively pursuing an additional 40. Nearly 15 of them are enabled with data we can mine from our electronic health record. The learning from this experience is immense. The dialogue the data generates between physician colleagues of like specialties build on the practice of medicine and causes us to have some deep conversations about why we approach cases differently. In the intensive care environment data developed in our “EHospital” allows us to provide and monitor all ICU beds in our system with an additional layer of oversight – dramatically increasing the quality of care and safe conduct of care to our patients.
Al Morales, IBM's Global Business Services Healthcare Leader, summed up the future of how digital will impact these two closely related industries, “Whether in the healthcare or hospitality industry, a positive experience really sets the tone and pace for the patient or consumer and is ultimately what attracts new business.”
