Healthcare’s workarounds
Every healthcare workaround is an unmet need. Who’s paying attention?
Ideas
When people find their own way around healthcare, they show you what’s missing. Pay attention, and those workarounds can reveal where your organization should go next.
When our systems designers go onsite to map how a client organization works, they have a habit. They go looking for the person with the most sticky notes all over their computer, and they ask what exactly that person is trying to work around.
Healthcare is full of sticky notes right now. People are building their own paths through a system that isn’t serving them well. It happens at the individual level, when patients ask an AI chatbot about a possible diagnosis before they call a doctor’s office or crowdsource doctor recommendations from friends and Reddit threads. And it happens at the organizational level, too, when a team pays for a separate navigation service to help employees use their own health plan, or when it signs a direct contract with a local health system for care it used to leave to the plan.
Workarounds tell you more than most formal market data. A survey tells you what people say they want. A workaround shows you what they’re willing to do to get it, which is a much clearer signal of an unmet need.
Every proverbial sticky note marks a need someone got tired of waiting for you to meet. Learn to read them, and to tell which ones matter for your organization, and you’ll see where to grow while everyone else is still waiting for the market reports.
Ask what job a workaround is doing
Those systems designers work alongside our futurists, and each group sees something different in a workaround. Our designers think about formal systems all day, so they see the gap between how a system is supposed to work and how people actually get through it. Our futurists look for signals of longer-lasting change, so they ask whether a workaround is a one-off fix or the early shape of something bigger.
I keep coming back to a question from a class on jobs theory I took with Clay Christensen years ago: What job is the customer trying to get done, and is anyone actually doing it for them?
Every workaround is an answer to that question. When an employer builds its own solution, it’s telling you about a job it once expected you to do. When a patient goes around the front door of the system, they’re showing you a job the system isn’t yet doing for them.
Those gaps are where your most interesting opportunities lie.
Every proverbial sticky note marks a need someone got tired of waiting for you to meet.
Menopause care and GLP-1s show where the system is falling short
The clearest example of healthcare workarounds I can think of right now can be found in perimenopausal and menopausal women. They are proactively moving outside the traditional system for expertise. The rise of perimenopause and menopause care is the story of new companies working outside conventional settings for women who couldn't get what they needed inside the system.
The same pattern shows up well beyond women's health. Look at GLP-1 medications. People are willing to pay out of pocket and sometimes skip a conversation with their doctor entirely to gain access to the coveted weight-loss drugs.
Each of those choices comes from the same feeling: I need something, and the healthcare system isn't going to give it to me, so I'll find it myself.
Anyone who has worked inside a health organization knows how hard it is to respond quickly when a new need appears. Heavy regulation and the stakes of getting care wrong make it difficult to color outside the lines. That difficulty has created room for challengers who build directly around the frustrations the established system hasn’t yet solved. They don't always make care more connected or easier to manage. Some make it more fragmented. What they do is solve a job that nobody else was solving, and people reward them for it.
For established health organizations, that's the opportunity. The challengers are showing you, in real time, which jobs buyers will go out of their way to get done.
Spotting a workaround is the easy part
A workaround only matters to your organization if it changes a decision for your specific business or points you in a direction that makes legitimate sense for you to go. Plenty of real, growing workarounds will have nothing to do with your strategy. Some are one-off fixes that will disappear as soon as a better option appears. Your job is to sift through them and determine which of them reveal a durable need you're unusually equipped to meet — and which of them are simply interesting.
Workarounds are one of the signals our futurists track. On their own, they show you what’s breaking today. Our foresight practice uses signals like these to map the plausible futures your organization may have to operate in, then works backward to what you can do today to have a say in how you get there.
That’s why a workaround is worth reading twice. In the short term, it points to a need you may be able to meet right now. Over the longer term, it’s an early clue to which future may be taking shape and where your organization should play in it.
Look for the sticky notes
Go looking for your market's sticky notes. Start with the people who hear about workarounds first. Your customer service team, which knows what members keep asking for that you don't offer, and your employer clients, who can tell you what they've started building on their own. Some of what you find will be noise. The workarounds that line up with what your organization does best are where your next move is already taking shape.
Shannon Langrand
Founder, CEO
Shannon is dedicated to helping senior leaders in highly dynamic industries to innovate and solve problems in the face of change.
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