Leung, Christa Y.

In 2018, Mayo Clinic completed the largest transformational project in its 150-year history. Mayo Clinic was prepared to take on the implementation of new software systems (Epic Systems Corp) as an integrated electronic health record (EHR) and revenue cycle management (RCM) system across all sites of the enterprise. Three foundational teams were launched for this project: leadership, project management and change management. In a project such as this, a common pitfall is to focus completely on the system and lose sight of the end users. For Mayo Clinic, the people side of change was at the forefront of the project. A robust change management team was budgeted, staffed and engaged with an experienced outside consulting partner. A goal for the change management team centred on the best way to measure the change management impact and the degree to which it was making a positive contribution in driving successful adoption of the new EHR and RCM system. With literature lacking in this area, the team moved forward with courage and quickly learned that the easy part was the development of a survey with questions mapped to the six components of the change management strategy and the phases of the awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement (ADKAR) Model (Prosci Inc). The hard part was building the infrastructure to visually display millions of rows of data that needed to be positioned, filtered and analysed for all affected locations. The authors share the methods to measure change and explain the importance of developing a comprehensive and robust means of gathering and displaying large volumes of change management data at the project onset. This paper prepares the reader to confidently develop an organisational framework to measure and report the effectiveness of a change management strategy.

Agility has been adopted in the software development industry for decades and has been used in the business world for the past 10 years. In healthcare, however, agility has not been widely adopted or studied but is emerging as imperative for competitive advantage in a rapidly changing environment. Human-centred agility and change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has become especially important. Change agility is composed of two aspects. While the first aspect is a mindset that embraces change, resiliency, flexibility and responsiveness to consumer needs, the second is an approach using collaborative efforts through self-organising teams. Healthcare organisations must adopt both aspects to leverage the collective value of change agility. To help staff embrace and develop a change agility mindset, healthcare organisations need to offer relevant educational courses and coaching; teach change agility principles and values by using case studies and real-life applications; and promote the right culture by building flexible systems, providing a safe learning environment and encouraging risk-taking. To grow and sustain change agility, healthcare organisations can benefit by using a continuous seven-step quest: examining the current state, defining the future state, assessing the gaps, developing strategies, executing the strategies, measuring progress and maintaining success. This paper addresses the strategy and iterative interventions developed by the Department of Management Engineering and Consulting (renamed the Strategy Department) at Mayo Clinic to prepare its professional staff to drive a business-focused, change agility mindset through benchmarking, education and experiential learning. The early experiences and lessons learned at Mayo Clinic in change agility are likely broadly transferable to other healthcare organisations.