Innovative, agile healthcare leaders use best practices to deliver quality care — learn how agile is improving healthcare innovation and patient outcomes

A host of factors are transforming the healthcare industry, including technology and automation, globalization, an aging population, and increased regulation. The COVID-19 pandemic has added to the urgency that healthcare providers be able to pivot quickly. The thriving and evolving business of healthcare depends on innovative leaders to drive operational excellence and deliver better patient outcomes.

Agile, a set of management principles developed originally for the software industry, offers healthcare leaders a philosophy for approaching a wide range of challenges in healthcare management. In fact, according to a 2019 Bain & Company survey, nearly 80% of healthcare executives want their organizations to be more agile, yet many don’t know how to achieve that goal. Current professionals pursuing a future in healthcare leadership will benefit from understanding how agile healthcare fosters communication, iteration, and innovation across healthcare teams.

What is agile?

Agile is a team-based approach to project management. It entails defining a fixed-time phase called a sprint (typically a two-week period of goals and objectives). At the start of each sprint, teams generate a list of deliverables, prioritized based on consumer input. When each sprint ends, both the team and the customers evaluate the work and make changes for future sprints.

Daily standups constitute another agile practice. These check-ins assemble team members to highlight progress on sprint goals and flag any blockers or impediments. A daily standup may consist of team members answering the following questions:

• 1. What did I work on yesterday?
• 2. What am I working on today?
• 3. What issues are blocking me (if any)

Agile healthcare emphasizes patient satisfaction and rapidly deploying functional applications. To better understand agile applications for the industry, healthcare professionals should start with the history, principles, and benefits of this approach.

The need for agile

Agile emerged out of a need to streamline workplace processes in software development. Through the early 2000s, engineers found themselves stuck and disempowered by traditional, front-end planning methods; the popular waterfall methodology frustrated software developers who too often felt blocked by hiccups in the product development pipeline.

Software developers recognized a need for an adaptive and responsive project management philosophy to guide workers and customers to better outcomes with greater consistency. Enter agile — a set of values and principles for project management.

Today, agile helps leaders and teams in a wide array of industries, including finance, construction, marketing and advertising, and healthcare.

Agile principles and values

Agile is a project management philosophy. As such, healthcare professionals can adopt agile principles in a variety of settings. Agile does not dictate what healthcare teams should do. Rather, it provides guiding principles that help teams decide how to prioritize work, communicate, and adapt to challenges along the way.

Healthcare teams who follow agile prioritize specific values:

• 1. Individuals and Interactions (Over Processes)
• 2. Collaboration (Over contracts and formal negotiations)
• 3. Responsiveness (Over Rigid Planning)

With this focus, agile enables teams to tailor planning processes to meet specific patient needs, leading to greater potential for innovation in the modern healthcare industry.