Zahid Salman is the president and chief executive officer of GreenShield, Canada’s only national non-profit health and benefits company, which he has led since 2018.
Do you remember the steps it took to rent a movie from the video store not so many years ago? You’d drive to the store, pray your movie was available, find it on the shelves, drive home to enjoy it and then scramble to return it before being charged those dreaded late fees.
Fast forward to today, and now we use an app to effortlessly stream what we want, when we want it. The tedium of the old experience is a distant memory. A ritual forgotten – and for good.
It took material technological advancement to transform how we consume movies at home. But it took something else too – an understanding of customer pain points and a deliberate strategy to significantly improve their experience.
This is the essence of genuinely disruptive technological innovation: It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires visionary thinking that responds to real needs by reimagining how we live, work and connect.
At GreenShield, we’re applying this philosophy to rethink how the health and benefits industry serves its customers – individuals and members of employer-sponsored benefit plans. Currently, about two-thirds of Canadian health care is publicly funded, while benefit plans provide coverage for the remaining third, encompassing services delivered outside the publicly funded system.
Traditionally, benefits coverage and health care service delivery have been treated as separate domains. At GreenShield, we see a better way forward – one that tightly integrates the two to create a more seamless experience.
To achieve this, we’ve transformed our business model: operating solely as a payer, focused on processing benefit claims, to become Canada’s first payer-provider, integrating the delivery of health-care services with the claims we process. Central to this transformation is GreenShield+, a groundbreaking digital platform that combines high-quality health-care services with effortless access to benefits coverage. This innovation ensures Canadians receive timely care with the added convenience of seamless claims processing and payment.
Our business model transformation and the technological innovation of GreenShield+ started with a disruptive strategy that put patients and plan members at the centre of their health care experience. But meaningful change doesn’t stop at a single organization or initiative. Leveraging technology to strengthen impact applies in virtually every sector and requires meeting four key imperatives:
1. Ensure any large-scale disruption or transformation is anchored to your purpose
Last week, I wrote about the importance of organizational purpose and that applies here as well. Our transformation has been rooted in our DNA as a non-profit with a mission to advance better health for all Canadians. By now uniting coverage and care in one place, we’re further removing barriers and simplifying the process, creating shared value and allowing Canadians to prioritize their health instead of struggling to manage fragmented systems.
2. Focus on your customer and their pain points
Addressing customer pain points is central to achieving product-market fit, but it can be more challenging with disruptive innovation. Customers don’t always articulate what they need because they may not yet recognize the alternatives. Steve Jobs famously noted, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Meaning, if he listened exclusively to what his customers were telling him they wanted, he would have built a better cellphone instead of a smartphone.
At GreenShield, we faced a similar challenge. No one specifically asked us to integrate coverage and care. However, our front-row seat to the health care needs of seven million Canadians gave us unique insight into the alarming obstacles they’re facing, such as:
- One in five Canadians lack access to a family doctor.
- Patients spend 2.5 times more time navigating the health care system than actually receiving care.
- Many are frustrated at having to retell their story to multiple health care practitioners.
- People want to live healthier lives, not just longer ones.
From these insights, we understood the need for a reimagined health care experience – one that enhances access, convenience, integration and health outcomes. Our strategy, which includes leveraging an innovative business model and emerging technology to enable it, has been laser-focused on addressing those four main pain points.
3. Change is hard and needs to be actively managed
Disruption brings significant change for all stakeholders – employees, customers, distribution partners and supply chain participants. Resistance to change is natural, which makes active change management essential. Customers need to be supported through the behaviour change(s) needed to drive adoption. Employees, distributors and suppliers need to understand why the change is good and what’s in it for them. At the same time, it’s key to recognize that it’s impossible to satisfy all stakeholders. Expect and plan for this. Maintaining conviction in your vision – supported by evidence of product-market fit – is critical for success.
A proven way to establish strong conviction is to start small and test solutions with customers before scaling. At GreenShield, we started with modest investments and partnerships early on to test our hypotheses and observe customer adoption levels. Only once we saw good absorption rates did we begin to scale our new business model through acquisitions (eight in two years) and build GreenShield+.
4. Recognize technology’s double-edged sword
Technology is not a panacea. It can’t solve every problem, nor can it replace the essential human touch in critical areas like health care. With technology also comes the critical need to manage issues such as data privacy, cybersecurity and equitable access.
So what you can and should do is approach technology thoughtfully – leveraging its strengths while mitigating its risks. This means building systems that prioritize user needs, ensuring that innovations are inclusive, secure and adaptable. Because, ultimately, technology is only as effective as the strategy driving it and the people behind it.
After many years leading organizations and working to improve the health and productivity of Canadians, here’s what I know for certain: Whether in health care or beyond, disruption begins with asking the right questions and daring to challenge the status quo.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.