The Conference Conundrum: Why Healthcare Executives Chasing Fads Undermines Long-Term Quality in Healthcare, and How to Fix It
- EvaluCare
- Dec 8, 2025
- 8 min read
Introduction
In an industry tasked with preserving life and promoting well-being, one would expect healthcare organizations to be models of strategic discipline and operational focus.
However, a troubling pattern continues to plague the upper echelons of healthcare leadership: the relentless pursuit of the next best thing, often initiated through the allure of glossy conferences and trendy jargon-laced sessions. While conferences promise insights into "care approaches" and "transformative leadership," their real impact on long-term and continuous quality improvement in healthcare is questionable. At best, these conferences can be intellectually stimulating. At worst, they can be detrimental, distracting and redirecting critical and limited skilled resources away from the foundational quality assurance (QA), quality improvement (QI), and quality control (QC) work that healthcare systems urgently need.
The Seduction of Healthcare Conferences
Healthcare conferences, particularly those targeted at C-suite leaders, have grown into major industries themselves. Events such as the HIMSS Global Health Conference or Becker's Healthcare Annual Meeting promise networking with elite thought leaders and exposure to the latest patient engagement strategies.
But there is a problem. These events often prioritize flashy presentations over substance, leading executives to latch onto ideas ill-suited for their organizations. For every new fad must be fit into an organization’s geosphere. What follows is a cascade of initiatives and 'buzz words' that drain resources, confuse staff, and divert attention from core quality activities. In a field already burdened with burnout, clinician shortages, and financial strain, the cost of such misdirection is steep.
From Fads to Failures: The Whack-a-Mole Effect
This cycle of chasing fads resembles a game of whack-a-mole. Each year, a new buzzword captures the imagination of executives: "patient-centered transformation," "digital front doors," "zero harm," "value-based care ecosystems." While none of these ideas are inherently wrong, the problem lies in their serial adoption without sustained commitment and redirection of focus from a core mission of delivery safe, timely, efficient, effective, equitable and patient and family centered care, as defined by the Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Brent James, former Chief Quality Officer at Intermountain Healthcare, emphasized in multiple lectures that,
"Improvement isn't about jumping from one big idea to the next. It's about applying scientific rigor and consistency to solve known problems."
A 2018 Harvard Business Review article titled "Why Organizations Don’t Learn" underscores this, explaining that
"leaders often pursue initiatives that are popular or recommended by peers, not those grounded in actual organizational need."
Without a "true north," a stable guiding vision grounded in data, quality metrics, and patient outcomes, healthcare systems drift. Resources are shuffled. Staff are whiplashed. And most importantly, patients suffer.
The Real Cost: Dilution of Focus and Lost Opportunity
Implementing any large-scale change in healthcare takes years. A 2021 study published in Implementation Science found that the average healthcare QI project took 17 months from planning to measurable impact. When leaders constantly pivot toward the next innovation from a conference, existing initiatives are abandoned mid-stream. This leads to poor staff morale, resource wastage, and the loss of valuable institutional learning.
Even worse, it often results in the de-prioritization of foundational QA/QI/QC efforts. These are not glamorous areas. They don’t get stage time at major conferences. But they are the backbone of safe, reliable, and effective healthcare delivery.
A 2020 report from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) warned that
"sustained improvements in care quality require embedded systems of feedback, control, and learning, not episodic bursts of innovation."
Top-Down Strategy and the Disempowered Middle
Healthcare executives wield immense positional power. When they return from conferences with new ideas, they often direct middle managers and clinical leads to implement them without input. This "top-down" approach disconnects strategy from execution.
Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor of organizational behavior, notes in his book Leadership BS that, "Senior leaders often suffer from overconfidence and isolation. They enact changes without understanding operational realities, causing more harm than good."
The result is that those in the middle, department heads, unit managers, clinical leads, are left to execute strategies they neither chose nor believe in. Worse, their efforts to advocate for more urgent local challenges are often ignored.
Enter Hoshin Kanri: A Structured Alternative to Chaos
Strategic planning doesn’t have to be this chaotic. Hoshin Kanri (also known as Hoshin Planning), a lean management method developed in Japan, offers a solution. It aligns an organization's strategic goals with its day-to-day operations by integrating input from all levels. "In an environment where resources are scarce, focus is not a luxury. It’s a necessity." — Dr. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
Hoshin Kanri emphasizes:
· A single "True North" objective
· Catchball communication between levels of the organization
· Consistent review cycles to evaluate progress
This method gives voice to frontline workers, ensuring that strategies are not just theoretically sound but practically viable for current boots on the ground challenges facing people and patients. According to a 2017 article in Healthcare Management Review, organizations using Hoshin Kanri reported significantly higher staff engagement and better alignment between strategy and execution. This approach produces a sustained focus and consistency of systems thinking and planning. Institute of Medicine, 2001: "Crossing the Quality Chasm" emphasized the need for sustained systems thinking over episodic innovation.
Healthcare Case Examples: Strategy Gone Astray
1. The EMR Boom: In the early 2010s, many hospital executives rushed to implement electronic medical records systems after hearing about their benefits at conferences. While EMRs are essential, hasty implementations led to widespread physician burnout, system failures, and in some cases, patient harm. A 2017 JAMA Internal Medicine article linked rushed EMR adoption with increased medical errors and provider dissatisfaction. There is no doubt that the Electronic Health Record was a needed advancement, but the “how” and the “who” is important here. How will it be adopted and who needs to be involved to make it successful.
2. Population Health Platforms: Between 2015 and 2020, many systems adopted expansive population health tools without sufficient data infrastructure. A 2022 analysis by Chilmark Research noted that 60% of these implementations failed to produce measurable ROI due to poor integration and unclear objectives. To this day, organizations focus on these platforms continues to have an impact and draw focus away from the quality of care delivery.
Rooted in Reality: The Path Forward
Instead of chasing external validation, healthcare executives should double down on building internal capability to support infrastructure that prioritizes expertly executing on quality:
Invest in continuous quality improvement teams, and associated expertise to support them
Invest in quality assurance tools, techniques and methodologies that enhance feedback on healthcare system performance near real time.
Empower clinical leaders with near-real time performance data, not generalized outcome data that is months old
Create strong feedback loops and error proofing for patient safety and quality. Standardize care pathways and measure performance of these pathways and targeted outcomes (PDSA).
Use strategic planning frameworks like Hoshin Kanri, involving and engaging all levels of organizational expertise.
Adopt tools that help automate insights and feedback into care that shorten the improvement cycle from years, to months, to weeks to days.
Moreover, they must be willing to listen to the concerns of those closest to the patient.
Real innovation comes from the patient bedside, not from the conference ballroom. We need to grow and adopt strategies that improve success, but we must be able to measure that improvement in quality, cost, experience.
Ballrooms distract focus, patients provide clarity. BMJ Quality & Safety, 2019: Disruption in strategic focus was a top driver of failure in hospital quality programs.
What Smart, Focused, Patient & Family Centered Adoption Looks Like
Most healthcare executives would agree that healthcare does need to improve at a much faster rate that it is now. The challenge becomes how can we adopt the right tools that do not distract from our mission of delivering exceptional care. How do tools enhance our ability to recognize when care goes wrong, to recover it before it harms.
With a focus on care, EvaluCare created Eva, platform to perform 100% medical care reviews on all inpatients. It is an example of how innovation can work when it focuses on patient care and the clinical teams that delivery it first. At a time when healthcare organization only review 1-3% of care, it is an example of innovation focused squarely on achieving healthcare aims for patients. It focuses on doing what we know we need to do right the first time because when we fail in healthcare quality, it is not because we didn't know what to do. It is because we failed to expertly execute on the things we know we should do.
"The fundamental problem is not ignorance, it is ineptitude. We fail to apply what we know reliably and consistently." — Gawande
Eva provides ongoing performance based feedback near real time on our adherence to clinical guidelines so that we can apply what we know reliably and consistently to drive quality.
Be aware of innovations far away from patient care that will distract from the mission.
What Patients Ultimately Need
When healthcare systems play strategy roulette, it's patients who pay the price. Fragmented care, staff turnover, inconsistent policies, frustrated middles, these are not abstract concerns. They manifest as medication errors, delayed treatments, avoidable complications, contentious contract negotiations and more.
Quality in healthcare isn’t about novelty. It’s about reliability. Its about continuous learning and improvement and supporting an ecosystem of quality around care. The best healthcare organizations in the world, like Mayo Clinic, Virginia Mason, and Intermountain Healthcare, are those who focus relentlessly on doing the basics extraordinarily well. To do it well they must be able to recognize in the moment when they do it wrong.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Focus in Healthcare
Healthcare needs leaders who are not enamored by jargon or distracted by the conference spotlight. It needs leaders who can resist the pull and instead commit to the steady, often unglamorous work of improving care delivery. Systems put in place and technology adopted should focus squarely on improving care.
Strategic discipline, humility, and operational empathy must become the new currency of leadership. Healthcare executives must model a culture of focused excellence, grounded not in what is trending, but in what is needed by patients and by clinicians.
Because in the end, the purpose of healthcare is to serve patients safely, reliably, and compassionately. That will never be a fad. And it must never be forgotten.
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Learn more at evalucare.net or contact info@evalucare.net.
About the Author
Jason Minor is a healthcare quality and transformation leader with nearly 30 years of continuous improvement experience. A Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality, Certified Professional in Patient Safety, and Certified Utilization Review Professional, he has led thousands of end‑to‑end improvement projects, mentored dozens of quality professionals, and pioneered healthcare SaaS innovations.
As Board Chair of the Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care, Jason has partnered with hospitals, non‑profits, and state agencies to elevate patient safety and care quality statewide. Previously, as Network Vice President of Quality at the UVM Health Network and through the Jeffords Institute for Quality, he guided the redesign of a system‑wide quality framework and led initiatives that achieved a number‑one patient safety ranking among the nation’s top academic medical centers.
In 2020, Jason founded EvaluCare to help organizations shift from episodic improvement to a robust quality assurance approach.
EvaluCare’s Eva platform leverages AI‑powered natural language processing, machine learning, and agentic orchestration to analyze and improve inpatient care and support comprehensive quality, mortality, peer, and utilization reviews.
Jason Minor, EvaluCare Executive Director
Network Director Continuous Systems Improvement Jeffords Institute for Quality UVM Health
Board Chair Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care Inc.,
Vice Chair Northwestern Counseling & Support Services, Inc
Lecturer UVM College of Nursing & Health Sciences
Quality Peer Reviewer Vermont Care Partners: Centers of Excellence
Recommended Resources
· Lean Enterprise Institute: Hoshin Planning
· BMJ Quality & Safety
