Matthew Bardsley is a man on a mission. Heading a newly separated company and tasked with rectifying its old-school reputation and sagging employee engagement scores, he made the call to completely break it and put it back together again. Innovators in the field of health technology, MedicalDirector is improving the efficiency, speed and security of data sharing, and boosting its own team’s cohesion at the same time. It’s been challenging, he says, but it’s working.
Tell us about the journey that you've led this company through since your appointment as CEO.
It was a business that reported through to me and when it got spun out from Primary Healthcare we had to really go on a transformation process. We decided to take nothing with us – none of the HR policies – but it meant we were flying blind for a while.
Over that last year we've taken that time to understand what it means to be us. You’ve got to break things up and reform. In my experience if you try and transform something, you just get anchored in the past, so you're better off just cutting it, being loose, and then tightening. But you've got to have the right shareholder, the right attitude, the right approach to be able to deliver that.
What benefits have you seen from your approach?
From my perspective what we see is an organisation of people who are more engaged. You can hear the buzz in the office now. This is a level that we've not heard before, and that ability to collaborate, the ability to get around to the customer and really help them with that issue as quickly and efficiently as possible has really been one of the key things that I’ve seen. Obviously the key outcome of all of this is you're back to market growth, you're bringing brand new innovations into the market – our new Cloud platform Helix is now live, and is getting great feedback from the industry and the GPs out there and our vision is really now staring to come to life.
We did an employee survey beforehand and we asked how many of our employees understood our vision and our strategy and I think it was less that 12 per cent and in our last survey we were up over 80 per cent of people who now clearly understand our vision.
So what is your greater vision for where you're taking the company?
Making people healthier around the world is really what drives us. A real belief that if we can contribute in a way that meaningfully empowers and supports healthcare we can dramatically improve the efficiencies and the quality – things that aren't our accountability alone, but that through technology we can enable.
We have this belief that we can enable the ideal. The ideal constantly evolves, and technology is only an enabler. So our real vision is to never stop – to constantly be creating that innovation that drives the outcome. The real innovation for us is 24/7 access to healthcare. Believe it or not in the year 2017 if you get a pathology test you have to wait 24 hours for that result, right? Not because of people, but because of systems, because the systems aren't up 24/7. Having a Cloud solution suddenly enables us to know it’s always on. So the real enablement that we’re excited about is providing that core 24/7 infrastructure.
The analogy I always use is if you go to a Pitt St Mall shop and it’s 9am-5pm, there’s a concierge there, there’s a whole lot of nice things around – but at 5pm the doors close. But you go to a 24-hour 7-11, and the whole shop looks and feels very different – lots of bright light, wire and shutters – just in case anyone tries to come in in the middle of the night when there’s no one around. So if you don't put it in the cloud you don't have the security and the enablement of a large cloud provider that then enables you to have your shop 24/7, because then you don't know when that service is going to arrive.
Whereas in the old days where it’s 9-to-5, and it’s a computer sitting there on the secretary’s desk and at the end of the daythey turn it off. In the morning all the pathology that was waiting from the night before came down. But now you've got a “shop” that’s put in infrastructure that enables 24/7 healthcare, that now allows people to transact in ways that they've never thought of before.
In your opinion, what does the future of work look like?
We are a believer of openness to change and multiple perspective. Today we live in an infinitely more complex world, the complexities of everything connecting and collaborating, suddenly creates a whole new paradigm on how you need to operate. Before you could very easily isolate conversations, for me that’s not the win. The win is to get the multiple perspectives of a problem or solution – and get it to happen quickly.
Here there are only two meeting rooms, all of our meetings are held in the open so that it brings that speed of delivery.
The four core values of Medical Director are care, openness, delivery and empowerment.
I don't want empathy, I want care, which is when empathy acts.
Openness is “bring it on” – bring on the challenge, bring on the change, bring on the perspective. I’m just another person in this team who has a perspective.
Each of those perspectives are equal in value and when you add perspective together it’s not one plus one plus one – it’s one to the power of the number of perspectives.
So bring on that confronting conversation about our customer or our business.
"The best outcome I can see is just an eclectic bunch of people – all caring, all delivering, all on the same issues together. "
Matthew Bardsley
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