Applying the Lessons of Disney’s MagicBand to Healthcare Delivery

In a previous life, I had the good fortune to lead one of the teams that contributed to the development of Disney’s MagicBand. Today, I’m in a similar role at Cardinal Health, one of the largest organizations serving the healthcare industry, and I find myself frequently revisiting that earlier experience as we tackle the challenge of shaping the future of healthcare.

If you haven’t been to a Disney park in a while, the MagicBand is an RFID-equipped wristband worn by guests. The wristband gives Disney visibility into where guests are at, what they are doing, and what they want to do next, enabling more efficient resource management. For guests, it delivers a much richer and more personalized experience than was possible in the past.

While some of the “magic” in MagicBands isn’t quite as astonishing in today’s connected and data-driven world as it was when they were introduced at the beginning of 2014, they marked a step-change in the use of wearable technology and customer data. And developing and implementing them was anything but easy.

As formidable as the MagicBands were, their challenges pale in comparison to what we face in transforming healthcare. Yet, I go back to this experience because the lessons I learned from that innovation apply to the challenges we face in transforming healthcare today.

1. Crisis Creates Opportunity

The MagicBand program arose out of a crisis: a highly influential women’s magazine published a story that characterized a trip to a Disney park as one of the most stressful vacations a family could take because 85% of their time at the park was spent waiting in line. That caught the attention of the executive team because it meant we weren’t delivering on the Disney brand promise of “magical experiences.” The question wasn’t if we would change, but how.

In healthcare, COVID-19 has had a similar effect, but with much higher stakes. The pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the healthcare supply chain when the production of medical equipment and PPEs were disrupted.

While this crisis had serious consequences, it is proving to be the catalyst for change at organizations like Cardinal Health that are exploring new ways to use data and AI to eliminate inefficiencies and optimize inventory placement and management. As one example, we quickly implemented an automated system for categorizing and routing email inquiries to handle the spike that occurred during the pandemic. This system will dramatically increase our efficiency and enable improved customer service well into the future. Forward-looking organizations will always embrace the opportunities created by crises.

2. Be Bold

Imagine pitching to your executive team a program that would require development of a new wearable, change virtually every established process for how customers interact with the business and require the implementation of new technology across the entire operation.

That’s what we did at Disney because that was what was necessary to execute on our vision of creating an immersive experience before guests arrive at the park, while they were at the park and after they left the park.

This same type of bold thinking is now being applied to healthcare. We recently initiated a major integration program to bring our two business segments onto a single data platform, something that was considered too ambitious just a few years ago. The vision driving these changes is as bold as the one that drove the development of MagicBands: create a patient-driven supply chain.

3. Be Collaborative and Persistent

That vision won’t magically become a reality. It has to be built brick-by-brick and that requires collaboration and persistence.

At Disney, we had to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure we had continued support from key executives throughout the long development process. That included building a scale model of the park so we could prove the feasibility of the technology and physically demonstrate how it would transform the guest experience.

Did those efforts slow development? Of course. But MagicBands wouldn’t exist today without them.

In the highly fragmented, dynamic, and regulated healthcare industry, innovation will require a high degree of communication, education, and collaboration across the full spectrum of stakeholders, from equipment manufacturers to insurance providers to physicians to patients. We may not even realize today the full extent of collaboration required to support our vision, but we know we must be persistent and inclusive in our efforts.

That may mean not moving as fast as we would like, but it will ensure that the innovations that come to market are meaningful and sustainable.

4. Encourage Experimentation

Everybody’s in favor of experimentation until they realize true experimentation requires tolerating and even encouraging failure. At Disney, we had regular townhalls where our CEO shared the five mistakes the organization made in the last quarter. This had the dual effect of making it acceptable to acknowledge failures and putting our failures out in the open so we could learn from them.

Transforming healthcare will require a high degree of experimentation, particularly in the development of new data products. Cardinal Health’s CIO, Brian Rice, is committed to continuing to foster an organization that drives innovation and takes on important challenges in our industry. He recognizes that nurturing our talent is critical to this mission. We have built a culture that emphasizes collaboration and encourages experimentation and innovation—and the failures that invariably accompany them—and have structured processes in place to move from experimentation to commercialization.

5. Data Unlocks Value

When we developed MagicBands, we knew that the “wow” factor was the transformation of the guest experience. We also knew that the data generated by the wristbands would be equally if not more valuable to the business.

Data represents the next frontier in healthcare transformation. In particular, there is a huge opportunity to combine supply chain data with consumer data from wearables and other equipment to create new data products that leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning to improve patient care.

As we make progress on this front, we will systematically reduce inefficiencies, become more agile in responding to customer requirements, and ultimately anticipate what is needed before it is needed. We will, in effect, become patient-driven.

We are aggressively expanding our team of data and analytics specialists to accomplish this goal and are confident in our ability to succeed. If you’re interested in learning more about Cardinal Health or joining our augmented intelligence team, visit CardinalHealth.com/careers.