Thinking Differently is a core part of the Strasys ethos and approach. A very simple idea forms an essential part of our toolkit to help ourselves and our clients think differently, and that simple idea is to look at things from new angles. We find one of the best ways to do that is through new segmentation or cuts of data.
Sometimes, this is about new triangulations or combinations of otherwise well-known data to answer specific questions – ratios being a classic example – but more often, it is simply a case of slicing data in ways they have not previously been sliced. When you look at something complex from a new angle, you get a new perspective and new insights
Healthcare: a fertile ground for fresh perspectives
Healthcare is particularly fertile ground for this type of approach. This is because healthcare professionals are so used to viewing the world through existing clinical disciplines and understanding staff according to traditional roles (nurses, doctors, midwives, pharmacists, etc.).
The General Medical Council recognises 65 medical specialities. These ‘ologies’ are the lenses through which medical skills are developed and through which much treatment is organised. However, a single ‘ology,’ or even a collection of ‘ologies,’ rarely encompasses the full health needs and journey of any individual patient.
Segmentation science: capturing individuality in patient services
When we seek to understand patient services at an acute Trust, we are typically dealing with hundreds of thousands of people with needs that cut across the 65 medical specialties and are each unique in their own way.
The science of segmentation is to find groupings of patients that are statistically significant in size while having clear correlations of specific attributes—i.e., being alike enough that generalisation is helpful rather than harmful, supporting good insight-based decision making.
The art is in deriving an appropriate number of segments (level of detail) for the decision to be made and in creating clear narratives from patterns in the data. We find that when patients are grouped by many characteristics, including social and demographic factors, their humanity and individuality come to the fore in a way that categorisation by symptom, disease, or medical service tends to downplay.
An exercise that might cause concern about reducing patients to statistics can have quite the opposite effect when done well. Just as the social determinants of health are as important to understand as diseases, so non-clinical factors are essential in developing rich understanding of patients through segmentation approaches.
Segmenting healthcare professionals for deeper insight
The same is true of segmentations to better understand and address the needs of healthcare professionals. Organisations usually understand their people by clinical discipline, band, and key diversity metrics. What can be illuminating is to look at what patterns and group characteristics emerge when team members are considered in segments such as ‘newbies.’ Whether a cleaner or CEO, new staff members face some challenges in navigating an organisation and settling in that can give them a great deal in common no matter their role.
Understanding their experience and challenges can lead to improvements in onboarding and organisational culture that bring enormous benefits to an organisation. Likewise, understanding as distinct groups leavers or the people who have stayed for a long period of time can be illuminating about what may be right and what needs improvement within an organisation.
Moving beyond standard benchmarking
The desire to look for new ways to cut data also goes some way toward explaining our Strasys dislike of standard benchmarking approaches. Often organisations are measured and understood in ‘standard’ ways simply so they can be compared to external benchmarks. Too often, this leads to ‘apples with oranges’ comparisons across very different organisational situations.
Even where meaningful difference is detected, it is very hard to turn that into actionable insight because why the apple differs from the orange in the given metric is usually unclear. At Strasys, we seek to understand the apple separately from the orange. By understanding, we can help to answer meaningful questions that drive tailored actions to improve.
Contrarian and correct: The Strasys Method
There is a great adage that to be successful in a competitive environment, you need to be both contrarian and correct. Triangulating and segmenting existing data in new ways is part of the Strasys method for stepping away from cookie-cutter consultancy and instead helping clients think differently to find new solutions to what are often long-running problems. The method looks for the contrarian in an industry where lives depend on being grounded in data and provably correct.
