Thursday, June 17, 2010:
The students arrived at Owen promptly at 7:00 AM for breakfast and to elect their new team leaders for the upcoming project. We loaded the buses promptly at 8:00 AM and headed for the newly opened Pinnacle building and the offices of Bass Berry. The view from the 28th floor was breathtaking. Mother Nature put on a show for us. Crowded around the windows that allowed for a panoramic view of downtown, we watched the beautiful cumulus clouds and sun give way to brooding, gray clouds of thunder, lightning, and torrential rain. It’s the small things like watching a thunderstorm roll in that makes us truly appreciate the beauty that life has to offer.
The 5th project of Accelerator 2010, HIMSS/Medical Banking, kicked off at 8:30 AM. John Casillas and his team issued this challenge: To create a Project Plan for the G7 Healthcare Financial Network. This plan includes validating the G7 Platform, creating a marketing plan and message for the platform, creating a plan for enrolling sponsors, creating a plan for monetizing deliverables for the platform, and developing ideas to support the new health reform bill. If you’re trying to understand all that don’t worry, we are too. This project is huge in scope and aspiration, but it could do wonders for the city of Nashville and the healthcare industry.
The teams chose at random 8 different target stakeholders, each with their own issues within the greater scope of the project. This project marks the first where each team will not be developing ideas for a singular entity. Although the ideas developed for each of the stakeholders will benefit the overall mission that the HIMSS team is trying to accomplish, the teams will be presenting their solutions they have developed for the stakeholder group that they drew. The stakeholders are: healthcare providers, banks/financial institutions, health plans/carriers/HMOs, employers, health technology, government, and consumers.
The teams did not break out for an initial team session but rather briefly discussed issue trees and possible hypotheses and then reconvened for a much-needed question and answer period. B2B issues are difficult enough; the esoteric healthcare world makes the project that much more complicated. With additional clarification, the teams were off and running with their ideas to create a platform to address issues in the healthcare financial network.
We arrived back at Owen around noon and worked right through lunch on the final Oasis team session. The teams are handling the different dynamics of the new rotation quite well. Finishing touches were put on storyboards, PowerPoints, and presentations. There was a mad dash to secure speaking order; some teams prefer the beginning, some the end. The teams that get stuck in the middle are usually the ones that get their deliverables in last; spinning wheels doesn’t get one very far.
Prof. Froeb entertained the students with his last Froebonomics session at 3:00 PM. He fleshed out his rational-actor paradigm one more time, focusing on its application to our current economy. He discussed government subsidies and taxation and how it affects the economy and ways to better align incentives to maximize a capitalist system.
Oasis dress rehearsals and fine-tuning presentations were on the docket for the rest of the night. Teams stayed well past midnight running through their presentations, receiving feedback, jazzing up the PowerPoint, going back through the presentations, ad infinitum. They were told on the first few days of the program that a presentation doesn’t really start to come together until the 9th or 10th time that it’s practiced; teams really took that to heart. Oasis is going to be very impressed come 9:00 AM tomorrow morning.