Beware the Sesquipedalian*
One gets an unique appreciation for the duplicity of the crafted word having worked with and for consultants. Words lose their meaning when used solely as a sales hook.
I recently read a sales piece from a consulting company on specialty pharmacy. It used words like ‘navigate’, ‘transformation’, ‘landscape’ and the like. It is OK to use words like these if they are more than window dressing. So, what makes these words meaningful?
Transformation means to make a thorough or dramatic change according to Dictionary.com. While many outpatient pharmacy retail clones might see a dramatic improvement simply by correcting operations, fixing something does not qualify as a business transformation. It is about building a new mousetrap, not simply a better one.
Another popular phrase is navigating a changing landscape. Success does not come to those who navigate someone else’s landscape. Envisioning your future state changes the landscape for others to navigate. Navigate means to follow and now is the time for hospitals to own and lead healthcare. Short of this, healthcare will become a part of the retail landscape.
I have worked with (or for) some large healthcare consulting companies. If they are any measure of transformation, then it would be fair to say that few (if any) outpatient pharmacies are performing as they should, and must, to be successful. They may be more efficient in the short term (cost and labor cutting), but they will continue to fail at their patient mission.
The real opportunity for hospitals lies in owning patient medication lives, not in cutting cost or labor. True, most outpatient pharmacies might reduce labor cost swapping out techs for pharmacists by properly aligning tasks. This approach, however, simply makes the pharmacy an efficient failure. Outpatient pharmacy operations must transform to something entirely new on the prescription delivery landscape.
Over the past fifty years, I have only ever considered true transformation as something that competition cannot easily adopt. In this context, while drive-thru pharmacies represented something new to drug retailers, competitors easily adopted it and any advantage quickly lost. Outpatient pharmacies have an opportunity, indeed an imperative, to transform to operations which retailers cannot adopt or even adapt to.
Make sure your consultant is not just using words as window dressing. If the transformation they are selling begins with cost and labor cuts, it is not true transformation and at best will result in an efficient failure. If navigating a changing landscape means adapting to someone else’s landscape, then you will continue to be part of someone else’s future.
* One who uses big words