The cost of healthcare administration is crushing Americans. According to [National Institute of Health](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53942/), it was projected to be $315 billion in 2018. This is we (a major healthcare payer) recognized an opportunity to improve the lives of thousands of healthcare providers and people like you and me by streamlining the provider experience. We originally thought launching a single Agile Release Train would help release software faster, making it easier for doctors and administrators to work with the organization. Turns out, it would take far more than that. In this talk, Dan Scalfaro – Director of Digital IT at a national healthcare payer – and Emilia Breton – Agile coach at Accenture | SolutionsIQ – will share their experience working together over the course of 6 months to establish a powerful communication platform that would ultimately break down barriers that had existed between various business and IT organizations for decades. As a result of our partnership, the organization stands to drastically simplify antiquated processes in healthcare, which all of us benefit from in the form of happier, less stressed healthcare providers.
So often coaches are brought into a group to implement a framework and the group never realizes the results promised by agile evangelists. In order to realize the true power of agility we found that we needed to start with transforming leadership and bringing together people, from across different business and IT silos and groups. We started out looking to launch a train and discovered a diverse and powerful group with the ability to change the face of healthcare now and in the future. Over the course of 6 months we built a new group that cut across traditional functional towers, divisions and specialties to launch a new truly cross functional virtual organization with one focus, removing barriers for doctors and make their experience with the organization easy.