Neil de Crescenzo

 

Healthcare Executive: How would you describe your leadership style?

de Crescenzo: Everything I do as a leader revolves around the primary goal of facilitating a rewarding environment for our team that will translate directly to helping improve the employee experience. My next priority as a leader is ensuring that we have the strategy and execution practices needed to provide more value for our customers and partners than any of our competitors. 

For example, during the past few months, we’ve implemented a “new hire onboarding tracker” that allows hiring managers to optimize the onboarding process for new people. The tracker provides detailed data that enables us to tweak the onboarding process to make it better. 

On the customer side, we’ve developed an ROI calculator that our product managers give to customers. This tool allows customers to determine the ROI of our various software, network and service offerings and even gives product and engineering teams a heads-up on when to sunset an offering that is no longer delivering compelling results.
Things can go wrong if we stray too far from these principles and practices. The keys to ensuring that we remain true to them are embedded processes, a robust performance management system with fast feedback loops and an emphasis within the leadership team on constancy of purpose.

HE: What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned about leadership? 

de Crescenzo: One of the challenges of working in an industry for decades is that you can forget to approach new situations with a beginner’s mindset. It’s tempting to rely on the pattern recognition you’ve developed and jump to a solution rather than take time to understand the subtle nuances of a problem that might need a fresh approach. I’ve learned that I am just as likely as anyone to make this mistake.

To guard against this tendency, we emphasize at Change Healthcare that the most important opinion is that of the person closest to the problem or closest to the customer or partner. We force ourselves to experiment with multiple options instead of presuming we can design the right solution upfront. Experienced leaders will make as many mistakes as those who are early in their careers; I certainly include myself in that. In fact, we give awards to senior leaders for their “fantastic failures” to demonstrate to everyone that failure is an inevitable part of true innovation. 

We’ve also learned that, in the digital age, your competitors quickly copy the “competitive moats” or sources of competitive advantage around your business. 

Infrastructure providers like the big cloud companies are rapidly democratizing advanced technologies. As a result, like them, one of the most important competitive advantages we’re developing is the speed and quality of our innovation. That means creating a supportive culture, hiring and inspiring the best people and executing on the right strategies. It’s not easy, but we believe that driving the speed and quality of innovation is the core of a sustainable competitive advantage.

HE: As you think about 2022 and beyond, what challenges are you facing and what resources are you using to address them?

de Crescenzo: The main challenge we face is innovating and bringing our innovations to market as fast as possible to make sure the healthcare system works better for everyone. There is more than $300 billion of addressable inefficiency and waste in the U.S. healthcare system. Our goal is to help our customers and partners eliminate that waste; improve access to services, especially within underserved communities; and create a healthcare system that is simpler, more personalized, more efficient and far less reliant on paper. 

HE: As you think about the future of healthcare, what do you believe should be top of mind for healthcare leaders, and what advice can you give?

de Crescenzo: Taking action to address social injustice, structural racism and bias within our industry’s services, within our own organizations and within our communities all need to be top of mind for healthcare leaders as we move into 2022. One of our company’s top five values is “Include All.” We challenge ourselves to do this every day by celebrating inclusivity, respecting each other, and valuing the diversity of our people and their experiences. 

We also challenge ourselves to develop solutions to address historical injustices. For example, through¬out the pandemic, we’ve provided services that have engaged people in underserved communities in addressing their healthcare and financial challenges and helped them gain the confidence to receive the vaccination. 

In addition, for years, we’ve helped millions of Americans access assistance programs about which they might not have been aware to obtain coverage for their healthcare bills. We also help our customers identify the unique needs of patients across diverse populations so they can better serve individuals.