Jessica Kenney has been working the Abbott Medical for several years and has been integrale in their Integrated Medical Solutions program development. This team has been working towards creating new opportunities and services in the healthcare field to make Abbott a more well rounded and competitive company. I was able to interview Jessica between projects and found it was best to transcribe the interview.
Q. Tell me a little bit about how you started with Abbott, or why you were attracted to Abbott, sort of an overview, please…
A. Working in Cardiology I was already familiar with a most of their products, and the hospital I worked with had been using Abbott devices specifically. Some of the ones our program were using was their mitral clip device, pacer, defib, and LVAD. I was looking for a job that would be a challenge and when I saw this listing I knew it was exactly what I was looking for. They needed someone to be a project manager of their digital solutions that they were drafting, and to take these solutions, implement them, and lead the products to commercialization. Abbott was looking for someone who could specifically be customer facing and knew the internal workings of a practice and help programs move them through the solutions. It was exactly what I was looking for and played into many of my strengths. I was also attracted to Abbott because they are so well known and has over 100,000 employees, and are very stable in that regard. Most companies who are doing this kind of work are startups and do not have the credibility of the Abbott name.
Q. How large is your team? How did the team get started?
A. My team is a small team within Abbott that was trying to do new and exciting things and looking to solve problems, not just earn sales. When I joined the team, the program was about a year old and since then we have grown rapidly. The goal of the team was to analyze the market and assess how we could make Abbott more competitive against our competitors Medtronic, Edwards, etc, and how do we make our devices more valuable and begin to solve actual problems. Most of what Abbott has been doing up until that point was to make products that providers could implant into patients. The flip side of the realm is that doctors are looking for ways to effectively manage patient care from a disease management standpoint, with follow up care included, not just implanting into patients. The teams went to advisory boards all across the country to find out the challenges cardiology practices, specifically advanced heart failure, were facing. The common themes that arose were that they have difficulty identifying these patients, it’s too late and/or the patients are too sick, and they were struggling to have active engagement from patients during this overwhelming diagnosis. Our team is working to address these top issues through innovative analysis and process creation.
We have five field consultants, in the five regions of the country, and five operations employees, including myself who is managing the pilots that both teams are working on. We also have a product solutions management team member whose focus is on the marketing standpoint, deliverables, price points, competitive benchmarking, and things of that nature. There is a data analyst who has created a data mining model to analyze where heart failure patients are being seen across the country so we can reach out and initiate a project with them. Finally, we also have a director of operations that oversees all teams, myself included.
Q. What was the largest challenge you faced when starting with Abbott?
A. When I started in this position the largest learning curve was if you have worked with one practice, you have only worked with one practice. They are all so different. I went in thinking that I was experienced and could tell them what to do based off of my previous experience. I quickly learned to level set at each practice and go in asking questions instead. In this position you have to learn what motivates the practice, what their overall goals are, and how their decision process works, and really get the whole picture to help them.
Q. Tell me the process from start to finish of working with a practice?
A. For 2019, the year we just finished, it was our pilot execution year. This year, 2020, we are working towards commercialization so some of this will shift as we turn towards more selling the solutions and modeling the return on investments for practices.
Our data analyst has a data set that allows us to help identify programs that could potentially be a part of our pilot. This data set looks like prescriptions and CMS claims data to help us model volumes and map where patients are being treated for Heart Failure. We then reach out to this hospitals and practices and pitch to them our solution and see if they are interested in being a part of our pilot program. Our solutions are focusing on using their current EMR system to help identify patients that are currently in advanced heart failure, or are at risk and could be evaluated to be in the clinic. The other solution we are rolling out is around patient education. Receiving an LVAD implantation is a huge, life altering experience. Those patients need consistent reiterations and constant education. We have created education modules and an app to help patients navigate, as well as assisting the practices and providers to manage their patients well.
Once we have pitched our product and they would like to proceed, we have to go through a negotiation contract to go through things like access to data and data security. Once all the red tape is out of the way, we then begin working with administration and providers to begin implementation of our solutions. We currently have ten practices in the education solutions, and six in the patient identification solution. Our team is gathering data and feedback now to see if the solutions were successful through identifying more patients and growing their practice, as well as if their readmission rates had decreased.
Q. What seems to be the largest challenge throughout the process?
A. The largest challenge throughout working with these practices has been negotiating the contracts and making sure that there are no concerns of unequal exchange of value and that there is no chance of inducement. Typically our contracts have been taking around 6-9 months of negotiation. We are unable to offer something like this for free, so all parties have to be clear that this is a fair exchange of value and that both sides are benefiting from this. This aspect should shift now that we will be moving into commercialization as there will be a clear exchange of services.
Another large challenge is ensuring we have administration and providers backing this project. If there is not investment from all parties it is typically not successful, or takes a long time to implement making it hard to track. They also have to have a hospital system where they have adequate IT resources to help navigate the patient electronic medical record system.
Another challenge, that is different in each location, are the operational barriers. They have to have a good handle on their operations to be able to push these changes through and possibly change workflows to grow their practice. If they are lacking in their operations, then they are likely not a good candidate. Taking a quick look at their operations has been a good qualifier to know if they are a good fit for our pilot project.
Q. How are things going in your company in general, right now: are you hiring, downsizing, or “staying as you are” in terms of your company’s workforce; are sales up, down, or flat?
A. We are still very much in a growth stage. We are working towards commercialization this year and hopefully will start to show return on investment with our clients, as well as for Abbott. We have not made any money as of yet, but are hopeful that this year will bring sales of these solutions and consulting contracts. If we are successful we will continue to grow as a team and begin to take on new healthcare areas outside of cardiology. Our plan is that we will be able to replicate this position I am currently in for each area of the country and be over all the managers for each of the regions. We will also expand and hire consultants in all of the regions.
Q. When problems arise, how does your management team (or how do you) resolve them? Do they arise with your team or more with the individual projects you are doing?
A. Some of the challenges we have had amongst our team have been good communication. All of our problems have stemmed around communication. We are a great team and work well together but occasionally we miss the mark on communicating with each other since we are all so separated. Our team requires rapid cycle development, rapid improvement, and rapid feedback. We are testing these solutions in the market and need to have quick decisions and quick movements. Several of the instances that come to mind are when our internal team is developing and packaging a solution in a certain way, and don’t communicate with the field team early enough. When that happens it is often different than their expectations of what would be a good market fit and what the market team was wanting to pitch to their clients.
An example we had was when we had an enterprise level account (a much higher level hospital corporation) and there was also work going on with the field consultants in one of the smaller hospitals within this conglomerate. Both teams failed to mention to the other that this work was happening on the smaller level. There ended up being a conflict there that could have damaged our relationship at both levels and prevented the deal from happening at the clinic level.
Q. How are you managing these miscommunications or lack of communications and addressing these concerns?
A. We have set up a weekly call where we have structured the call so that we focus on new updates for the week, and then we have one person from the field take turns presenting learnings or anything they would like to share. It is more of a thoughtful approach to presenting to the teams. Then one of internal teams is focusing on one of the pilots and what barriers we have run into this week and use that opportunity to address that. What we have noticed by restructuring those meetings to run in that manner is we are able to make decisions and move that needle forward by providing real feedback to each other.
Q. What kind of personal growth do you anticipate having in this company? Are you going elsewhere eventually?
A. I think there is a lot of room for personal growth within this company. I had no idea when I was moving into this realm that I would be finding this level of professionalism and this level of intellect. It is really awe-inspiring to work with these people. They challenge me and make me better every day. I am learning something new every day. I think I will stay in this position for several years, I am still learning so much and want to continue to learn from these teams.
Q. Would you ever open your own consulting firm?
A. It is really difficult to earn credibility in this industry. Unless you are clinician it is really hard to build that credibility on your own. What Abbott provides is the immediate credibility. Everyone knows these products and devices, you say the Abbott name and healthcare professional immediately know the company. We are able to use these relationships that were already established through products and take those relationships to a new level. Opening your own consulting firm would be much more difficult and the resources and relationships would be greatly limited.
Q. What is your favorite part of this position? Least favorite?
A. I really enjoy the teams I am working with. They challenge me every day and they are one of my favorite components. I also really love to problem solve on each of the project. Every project there is a new issue to conquer, something new to work on.
My least favorite part of these job is there is not any off the cuff brainstorming discussions. It is a major shift in the way you are communicating with your team. Almost all interactions are happening over the phone and once we get together in person, it is almost so formal and there is such a large agenda, and it can squash off the cuff brainstorming. The whiteboard brainstorming was one of my favorite aspects and that unfortunately does not get to happen.
Q. Could you describe a typical day?
A. When I am on the road, which is 2-3 days a week, I am going from the airplane, straight to the hospitals, in the field with customers. During those in person interactions I am typically checking in with established pilots, training new staff, and collecting pilot data. These meetings could be a variety of people; IT, providers, or VAD clinics themselves. Occasionally I am also joining in initial pitches.
In between these meetings I am analyzing data. For example, today I am looking for how many patients are at each risk score level and how many people have actually been referred to help highlight clinics issues and why they may need these solutions. One of the things I analyze and help clinics decide is what is an appropriate risk score cut off? We are making these decisions based off of so many individual clinics data and workflows that each has to be analyzed individually. I am helping them look at clinic capacity, so how many slots do we need to fill, and looking at referral rates to see how many people would probably get to the clinic.
Q. What advice would you give to someone who was considering a career in consulting? What are areas I could strengthen in?
A. Someone who can see the forest through the trees, understand at the strategic level what these companies are wanting to do and not get too bogged down in the details. This person should also be able to be the intermediary between what the clinicians want, and what is actually possible for IT to actually produce. They essentially need to become a translator between the two parties. Someone who is strong in organization and can push projects through to the end. Someone is will put themselves out there and will push the clients to work and start working on your behalf and stand behind this project. It will have to be someone who is able to build that passion behind what we were doing and rally the leadership teams in the clinics to help build the programs. An area in particular would be being comfortable in both the customer setting and being able to push things through on the internal side as well. These are all areas that someone needs to be strong in to really succeed and excel in this area.
