Presentation title: Complex collaboration in Canadian healthcare: organizational and strategic levers

Abstract: This keynote address will focus the issues that are hindering the complex collaboration needed to resolve stubborn organizational and societal challenges in Canadian healthcare settings. I will contend that Healthcare, in Canada and elsewhere, can be greatly helped if we address organizational inefficiencies and management challenges that hampering the provision of healthcare services.

The challenge of collaboration is especially acute in healthcare organizations because they must ensure that critically ill patients receive the appropriate treatment at the right time, by the right specialists, in the most cost-effective manner possible. Since health services are highly regulated while organized along different professional specializations, the complexity of decisions, control, and coordination around treatment and care delivery is high. Innovative organizational solutions are needed for the system of healthcare to offer more patient-centric care, incorporate innovation in treatment and care delivery in a resource constrained environment. For example, the coordination of expertise is at the heart of how a hospital operates and delivers care. Every day, healthcare organizations face challenges in ensuring that the relevant diagnosis is made, that care is effectively coordinated, and that relevant caregivers are constantly up to date about patient conditions. Further, healthcare is rapidly digitizing and moving towards incorporating many work transforming technologies such as AI, HER, robots, medicine at distance, expanded digital analytics, or precision medicine. Further, the difficulty of the healthcare system to respond to the COVID pandemic has driven home the need to introduce managerial, organizational, and complex collaboration principles to enable better innovation and system-wide change.

Based on a quarter-century research in healthcare, I will offer organizational observations and diagnoses about the state of collaboration, coordination, and service provision in healthcare.  I will address what technological solutions can or cannot change in the health sector and offer elements of an organizational diagnosis of the current state of organizing and the various challenges where management and organizational scholars can most effectively engage with.