Alex Fairweather explains why the role of a healthcare leader now includes being a continuous learner and innovator.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” said Abraham Lincoln. The comment from the US president rings true in healthcare today. Private healthcare operates amid rapid advances in digital health and generative AI, yet many leaders stick to familiar routines. In an era when healthcare has lagged behind other industries in adopting AI, the need for leaders proactively to scout emerging technologies has never been greater. Tech awareness is now a core leadership imperative and clinic leaders need to discover and adopt innovations – all while fostering the right culture.
Strategies for scouting emerging technology
How can busy practice leaders actually keep up with the whirlwind of healthtech developments? It starts with making tech scouting a routine part of leadership work. One strategy is to cultivate an open network beyond your organisation. An open leadership mindset – reaching out to peers, industry groups, and even competitors – can pay dividends. Building this social capital keeps you informed of what others are doing. Leaders might join innovation forums, attend conferences or webinars, and subscribe to reputable health technology journals. These channels can alert you early to promising new solutions.
Internally, consider appointing innovation champions or small teams to research emerging tech. Some clinics rotate this role among staff to spread the learning. Encouraging employees to experiment with readily available tools is another tactic – for instance, allowing a doctor to try a voice-recognition AI for note-taking or letting reception staff test an online scheduling system. Such grassroots experimentation can uncover useful tech with minimal top-down effort. Leaders should also partner strategically: collaborating with a health tech startup, university or innovation hub can give your practice early access to innovation at low cost. Above all, maintain an open organisation – one where ideas from inside and outside flow freely. Furthermore, openness to collaboration with the wider community unlocks opportunities and benefits from new technologies.
Staying educated is important, fortunately there are many online sources to read about novel technologies in the context of healthcare. Training and consultancy can also be sought from specialists.
Learning from real-world success
Real-world examples illustrate how proactive tech adoption can facilitate positive change both in healthcare and other industries. According to a 2024 medical group survey, 43% of practices had added or expanded AI tools in the past year. Their top use cases included automating documentation with AI scribes, triaging patient communications with chatbots, and streamlining. These adopters show that you don’t have to be a huge hospital to leverage emerging tech.
Consider the impact of seemingly small gains; Mayo Clinic piloted an AI assistant to draft responses to routine patient messages, giving nurses a first draft reply. The result was a time savings of about 30 seconds per message, adding up to an estimated 1,500 hours saved across the organisation in a month.
Such successes don’t happen by accident – they were enabled by leaders who were aware of new solutions and prepared their teams to use them. The good news is that once a few small wins are achieved (say, an automated reminder system that cuts no-show rates, or an AI that streamlines coding and billing), it builds momentum and confidence in further innovations.
Embracing continuous innovation
The role of a healthcare leader now includes being a continuous learner and innovator. By creating a supportive culture, engaging stakeholders, and actively scouting for promising technologies, leaders can turn the buzz around emerging technologies into tangible benefits for their practice. The notion of change can be worrying, but if innovation scouting is done in alignment with the objectives and strategy of the organisation and facilitated by a strong culture of innovation, it should be a positive experience for all stakeholders.
The alternative is riskier: ignoring the rapid evolution of healthcare technology. As management thinker Peter Drucker cautioned, “the greatest danger in times of turbulence is to act with yesterday’s logic”. Forward-thinking clinic leaders will heed this advice, embracing new tools not for the sake of novelty but to solve real problems in their context and enhance patient care.
Ask yourself: Am I doing enough to explore what’s out there? Building time for innovation into your leadership routine could transform your practice and the lives of your patients. In the end, the goal isn’t just to adopt tech, it’s to better fulfil the mission of improved patient outcomes. By scouting and harnessing the right emerging technologies in alignment with your organisation’s strategy, healthcare leaders can ensure their organisations are not just reacting to the future, but playing a part in creating it.
