Health care is evolving quickly, but the most successful organizations aren’t just reacting. They’re proactively building the capacity to manage change before the pressure mounts.
by Amy Jackson – SVP Product Leader, Compensation Management
Tony Robbins captured a strategic reality most leaders know intuitively: “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” As health care executives, we’ve lived through this reality as our organizations navigated the transition to value-based care, telehealth adoption, and other pandemic-related obstacles that tested every assumption we had about operational agility.
But what separates those still catching up from those setting the pace? The best don’t wait for crisis-driven change. They build their ‘change muscle’ – or ability to adapt and adjust – by making small and deliberate transformations now to prepare for the larger ones ahead.
Right now, your organization sits at a crossroads that may not feel urgent – but it should feel strategic. The health care landscape will continue to evolve, and your organization must be ready when the next wave of change arrives. Evaluating, adjusting, and evolving the way you administer provider compensation may be the perfect place to begin navigating this important preparation process and building a change muscle of your own.
However, change requires a well-balanced mix of motivation and ability. When we have high motivation but low ability, we get frustrated efforts and teams that burn out. When we have high ability but low motivation, we get stagnation disguised as readiness. The sweet spot where lasting change occurs can only exist when both elements align.
The Foundation You’re Building Without Realizing It
Financial pressures are mounting, reimbursement models continue shifting toward value-based structures, and provider expectations around work-life balance and compensation transparency are changing. The pain of staying the same is increasing each quarter, and it’s motivating most health care organizations to make a move.
Consider your current provider compensation processes. You’re likely managing complex calculations across multiple specialties, tracking a wide range of productivity metrics, and spending countless hours each month ensuring accuracy while providers wait for transparent insight into their earnings and performance.
Administrative challenges like these may have pushed your organization to modernize its approach to compensation administration by standardizing data, improving processes, adopting new technologies, and more. Collectively, these adjustments are a microcosm of larger transformations to come. Fortunately, the skills your organization develops in modernizing your compensation administration process are the exact capabilities you’ll need to navigate the shifts ahead.
Many leaders underestimate both the complexity and value of foundational changes like these. Implementing provider compensation software, for example, may seem straightforward – after all, it’s just automating existing processes, right? In reality, you’re creating ‘change readiness’ by establishing new workflows, training teams to adjust their daily routines, and proving to your organization that evolution is possible without major upheaval.
Every successful transformation your organization has navigated started with leaders and staff who believed change could be managed successfully. That confidence doesn’t emerge out of thin air – it’s built through repeated experience with positive change outcomes.
So when new regulatory requirements emerge, when payer contracts demand different measures, or when your organization needs to revisit compensation models to attract and retain talent in a competitive market, you’ll be well-prepared and able to rely on the same change muscles you’re building today through small but deliberate adjustments.
These improvements have a compound effect. When you streamline your compensation processes, you’re not just addressing today’s administrative headaches – you’re supporting future analytics initiatives with greater data integrity. You’re establishing workflows that can flex when new compensation models emerge, and developing organizational comfort with technology-enabled change.
More importantly, you’re freeing up leadership bandwidth. Instead of spending valuable time on manual processes and error correction, your team can focus on strategic questions like:
- How should we structure incentives to support our quality initiatives?
- What compensation models will help us compete for top talent?
- How can we align provider incentives with our organization’s long-term sustainability?
The Risk of Waiting
While it can be tempting to bundle all your transformations together by waiting for the next major strategic initiative and tackling compensation modernization as part of a larger overhaul, this approach carries hidden risks:
- It treats change as an event rather than a capability. Organizations that excel at transformation view change as an ongoing competency instead of something that happens every few years during major strategic pivots.
- It misses the learning opportunity. When you modernize compensation processes, the lessons learned and insights gained regarding data quality, change tolerance, vendor management capabilities, and other key areas serve as invaluable preparation for larger transformations.
- It assumes you’ll have the luxury of choosing your timing for future changes. The health care industry’s track record suggests otherwise. Organizations that thrive build their change muscles before external pressures demand immediate transformation.
The most resilient ones treat operational excellence as strategic preparation and understand that the ability to smoothly execute change is itself a competitive advantage.
Your provider compensation processes impact every physician in your organization. The way you handle this transformation, communicate changes, ensure data accuracy, and train staff on new workflows becomes a template for how your organization navigates change.
When the next wave of industry transformation arrives, you want your organization to respond with confidence rather than uncertainty. You want teams who have successfully navigated process changes before and leaders who understand how to balance stakeholder needs during transitions.
It’s Time to Start Building
Tony Robbins was right about pain driving change – but he didn’t tell the whole story. The most successful organizations don’t wait for pain to exceed their tolerance for the status quo; they proactively build their capacity for change when the stakes are manageable and the learning environment is controlled.
Your provider compensation processes may not keep you awake at night, but the strategic opportunities they represent should energize your willingness to change. This isn’t just about automating calculations or improving transparency, though those benefits are real and valuable. This is about building the organizational muscle memory that will serve you when the next inevitable transformation arrives. Because in health care, the question isn’t whether change is coming – it’s whether you’ll be ready to lead it with confidence, competence, and the kind of operational excellence that turns challenge into competitive advantage.
The foundation you lay today becomes the platform for tomorrow’s possibilities.
Ready for a change within your organization?
Our innovative Compensation Management platform can help!
Let’s Talk!