CX ‘rule breakers’ key to a healthier America? Q&A with Mike Butler

During 22 years at Providence in a range of executive leadership positions, including president, Mike Butler helped the health system expand from $2 billion to the $25 billion organization it is today serving some 24 million people. 

Butler is credited with driving innovation relative to both clinical improvements and affordability; advancing population health, digital transformation and revenue diversification; and addressing societal issues including homelessness. 

Today, he serves as a Healthcare Operating Partner at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, Co-Founder of EcotoneGrowth Ventures and an advisor to multiple healthcare companies including being on the board of directors at League. In that capacity, Butler attended League Connect 2023 in Miami during February. 

I interviewed Butler about the premier healthcare consumer experience (CX) transformation event, leading positive rule breaking initiatives, how he envisions digital CX evolving in the next three to five years and more. 

Q: What is your perspective on the conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and David Epstein about ‘rule breakers, artists and innovators’ at League Connect 2023? 

A: I took away three perspectives from the conversation: It is not a matter of when but, rather, how and why.

Related to the ‘when,’ having spent my entire career in healthcare, great digital CX in healthcare has been the deepest passion and greatest disappointment. I believe we have a moral obligation to give every person the opportunity to affordably and predictably live their life to its fullest — body, mind and spirit. If you want to truly break the rules you have to persevere no matter what stage of life you are in. 

The ‘how’ is about responding to the sign of the times when the need is greatest and finding experienced fellow rule breakers to deliver in the here and now. 

The ‘why’ has to always be done for the greater good, which creates more rapid follower-ship in achieving the mission. I see this happening in the digital healthcare CX space like never before. 

Q: In the course of your career, how have you led positive rule breaking initiatives? 

A: My leadership mantra is “together nothing is impossible.” Start there, then focus on a huge concrete objective — backed by real facts and a high-level road map — that essentially no one believes can be achieved followed by demonstrating servant leadership on day one.  

Servant leadership to me is the following: lead by listening, be vulnerable, have an insane sense of curiosity, be an efficient, effective collaborator, make disciplined decisions, live the solution you are implementing and keep continually refining. 

We often use the GE Change Acceleration tools to bring structure to these initiatives. It created a common language and helped weed out the detractors sooner rather than later so that you had alignment to hit that huge concrete objective. 

Q: And what has been the payoff that might not have been achieved without rule breaking? 

A: I’ll never forget two initiatives I led that followed this approach to a T. The first was going to our executive leadership team and board and letting them know we needed to go from a $10 billion to a $25 billion company in order to sustain the mission and that we could only do that in contiguous markets to our current footprint. That was slide 1 the first time I presented my growth objective to sustain the mission. I showed that to an internal conference including hundreds or our leaders to start the journey. They thought I was crazy at first, the goal was huge and required breaking a lot of rules to accomplish it — but we succeeded. 

The second was our implementation of Epic. I was the executive sponsor of what still is the largest Epic single installation ever. Despite not being popular at the time, I made the decision that it was going to be one instance of the electronic health record (EHR) — not seven — as each of our regions would have liked. To show it could be done I co-led, with a nurse and a doctor, the first major decision regarding the technology standard in neonatal care. 

Q: After a successful career leading Providence, what makes you excited to focus on healthcare CX? 

A: The need has never been greater for consumers, patients, physicians, caregivers, hospital systems and health plans than now to create a great digital healthcare CX. From a greater good perspective, we absolutely need a healthier population. The poorer the health of a person the greater the negative impact every stakeholder in the healthcare ecosystem. Only great digital healthcare CX will change this paradigm. 

CX is also important because healthcare is a business. Every decade or so when we have macroeconomic challenges, the industry is greatly impacted. Go back to 2008 and the market response was the high-deductible health plan. The hope out of that change was that consumers would take charge of their own personal health and reduce the overall costs of healthcare over time. That did not work anywhere close to the degree many people hoped it would.

In addition to not achieving that goal, it created a whole new category of economic debt for millions of people. I believe the way out of the current macroeconomic challenge relies almost 100% on the rapid adoption of transformed digital healthcare CX. It will define market winners and losers. 

The winners will realize market share growth, more customers for life, greater percentages of overall health, improved workforce recruitment, engagement and development and a reduction in the overall total cost of health across the nation.

Q: Looking toward the future, how do you see CX evolving in the next three to five years?

A: I am looking forward to a few things. The first is my hope that healthcare will become very balanced, meaning better health, lower cost and greater predictability of needs and services for every person. 

The second area is the further use of data and healthcare CX platforms that will radically reduce all aspects of disparity in health and healthcare globally. 

Another area relates to a comment Malcolm Gladwell made about the fact that the U.S. federal government reports key economic indicators monthly but 99.9% of the population could care less. I’d like to see us be the rule breaker to build and advocate for a monthly reporting of the key health indicators that 100% of the population cares about. 

Imagine a day of seeing those U.S. maps showing COVID-19 cases that grew familiar to so many people becoming the composite health index of the residents of every state instead? That would be transformational rule breaking.