The Cost of Waiting: Why Healthcare Can't Afford Slow Decisions with Mark Van Sumeren
The healthcare industry faces significant consequences when delayed decision-making occurs. Prompt and efficient action is crucial to prevent adverse impacts on patient care and operational efficiency. Addressing this issue requires a commitment to more agile and informed decision processes.
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Key takeaways
Delayed decision-making in healthcare can lead to negative impacts on patient care and operational efficiency.
Healthcare organizations are encouraged to adopt agile decision-making processes to improve effectiveness.
Implementing informed and prompt decision-making strategies can mitigate the risks of inefficiencies and poor patient outcomes.
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Healthcare organizations spend enormous amounts of time developing strategies, analyzing opportunities, and discussing transformation. The challenge often comes when it is time to actually make a decision.
On this episode of *I Don’t Care with Dr. Kevin Stevenson*, Dr. Kevin Stevenson welcomes **Mark Van Sumeren**, a healthcare strategist whose 45-year career has spanned health systems, consulting, supply chain, publicly traded companies, and private equity-backed organizations. That experience has given Van Sumeren a unique perspective on why healthcare organizations often move more slowly than their counterparts in other industries.
Decision pace is capacity.
Central to the conversation is Van Sumeren’s observation that healthcare leaders routinely think about capacity in terms of beds, staffing, capital, and clinical resources, but time is a finite resource as well. Every delayed decision consumes additional executive attention, staff resources, and organizational energy while potentially narrowing the options available.
Structural reasons for slow decision-making
Stevenson and Van Sumeren explore the structural reasons behind healthcare’s tendency toward “paralysis by analysis,” including consensus-driven governance, unclear decision authority, misaligned incentives, and an organizational reluctance to accept failure. They discuss the need for what Van Sumeren calls **deliberate speed**—making thoughtful, informed decisions without allowing deliberation itself to become the obstacle.
Examining healthcare supply chain strategy
The conversation also examines healthcare supply chain strategy, the significant opportunity surrounding nonclinical spending, and what health systems can learn from industries that operate with greater financial and operational discipline.
The message is not that healthcare should simply move faster. It is that organizations must become better at determining who owns a decision, what information is necessary to make it, and when that decision must be made.
In an environment of tightening margins, workforce shortages, and rapid technological change, the cost of waiting continues to grow.
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