EMBRACING CHANGE SUCCESSFULLY – ONE COMPANY’S STORY

Disruptive technological change can wreak havoc, wiping out jobs held by lower-skilled, middle-aged workers and consigning former giants of industry to history’s dustbin.

Disruptive change can also empower people and dramatically improve the quality of their lives. Just ask Sue Paish, president and CEO of Lifelabs, Canada’s largest community laboratory, who moderated a BCIT panel at a Greater Vancouver Board of Trade luncheon last week.

“We are faced with the opportunities to either embrace or ignore that tech change, and we do the latter at our peril,” she said in a later interview. Lifelabs decided to grasp the opportunities, using the tremendous advances in data collection and analysis that didn’t exist a decade ago, to deliver an important benefit online to more than 1.2 million patients across Canada.

Today, more than 750,000 patients in British Columbia and 460,000 in Ontario are able to view their lab results online through the company’s My Ehealth program in as little as a few hours after the tests are done.

Paish said her company—with more than 5,400 employees who process more than 100 million lab tests annually—could have entered the debate about whether or not patients had the right to this information. It could have continued focusing on delivering results faster to physicians or looked for ways to better alert patients that the test results were now available.

Instead, it considered that its vision of“building a better Canada” was better served by working on delivering lab results directly to patients.

“(The information) belongs to the patient. Give them the information so that they can start to make decisions with their physicians about how to preserve their health,” she said.

Lifelabs has benefited from employing BCIT grads that work in 30 different areas of its business and demonstrate tremendous technical skills, and, just as importantly, a proactive mindset that says,“Let’s look at solving this problem differently,” she said.

“It’s that mindset of being proactive that is the reason we feel so aligned with BCIT. And it’s that kind of mindset that allow us to do things like the My Ehealth program.”