Changing how work gets done can inspire improved healthcare outcomes

“Work” continues to evolve: what it accomplishes, how it is done, and who does it. As we look to the future of work in the context of emerging technologies, the life spans of expanded multi-generational societies, and climate change, we should expect to see broad implications on economics, societies, and healthcare.

Better ways of working in the enterprise must inspire better ways of working in healthcare, resulting in better health outcomes. A recent TCS event explored how work in the enterprise can change to support a resilient future.

Work philosophy and its manifestation impact enterprise valuations

TCS believes that the value of enterprise work as a function of time follows the S-curve principle—a pattern where the value of work changes slowly initially, rises rapidly with improvements in methods to do work, and then settles into a plateau over time (see Exhibit 1).

Further, during the middle lifecycle phase, most enterprise work relies heavily upon individuals and their tacit knowledge instead of standard operating models. This causes significant variability in the quality of work output and outcomes. At an enterprise level, this variability can impact financial performance; an enterprise drops out of the S&P 500 index every two weeks, and variations in the quality and outcomes of work could be a leading factor. To better manage variability, enterprises must create work-next practices, an approach to enhance value and optimize deliverables in a controlled environment.

Exhibit 1: It is imperative to create work-next practices continuously to avoid stagnating and diluting the value of work

Source: TCS Analyst Day 2023, HFS Research 2023

Enterprises must continuously create new work practices to create value and foster sustainable growth. The acceleration of digital work and the proliferation of emerging technologies has placed enterprise work at an inflection point. There is an expectation that artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) will transform all work, creating intelligent digital workspaces to augment human talent. This will lead to a continuous redefinition of all business and IT capabilities.

To drive such continuous transformation, enterprises must design work to be vibrant; for TCS, “vibrant” means purposeful, intelligent, and systemic. AI must be leveraged to reduce variance in quality, and work must be productized so that it is packaged, available for on-demand activation, and consistent. For example, such transformation could manifest in a 10-1000x improvement in DevOps performance, measured in terms of frequency of deployments, lead time for a change, restoration of service, and change failure rate.

TCS’ “future of work” concepts can have significant positive impacts on healthcare delivery

Healthcare, when viewed from the lens of the triple aim of care (reducing costs, improving health outcomes, and enhancing experiences), needs great improvement. Multiple estimates indicate the Healthcare NPS (net promotor score), a health consumer feedback measurement, is lower than the NPS for used car sales. Six in 10 people in the US have a chronic condition, and life expectancy in the US has regressed to levels last recorded in 1996, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Leveraging concepts such as TCS’ “future of work,” which combines continuous creation of new work practices with technologies such as AI, and generative AI, healthcare enterprises, must explore redesigning their value chain.

In continuously improving their processes and infusing them with AI’s intelligent decision-making capabilities, healthcare enterprises can jettison work like mail room functions and prior authorizations, which are wasteful and negatively impact the triple aim. They can leverage AI to proactively address the needs of health consumers, such as nudging for annual physicals or driving the use of health wearables.

Redefine work to support and enable key objectives like maintaining health, preventing diseases, increase access to health and care instead of the legacy reactive healthcare work functions.

The Bottom Line: Transforming the enterprise work paradigm must translate to better outcomes for health consumers and healthcare enterprises.

Healthcare enterprises, whether health plans or healthcare providers, must rethink work in the context of its impact on its ecosystem of patients, members, employees, and partners. The same old same old approach to doing work that may have addressed the 20^th-century challenges is unlikely to solve 21^st-century issues exacerbated by climate change, societal polarization, lifestyle choices, and much more. It is time for work transformation.