EP368: How to Successfully Roll Out New Benefit Designs to Employees and New Care Delivery Models at a Provider Organization, With Ashleigh Gunter

The Five Steps to Change Management That Actually Sticks, With Ashleigh Gunter. Why Rolling Out New Benefit Designs Fails Without Real Change Management. Episode 368.

Stacey Richter talks with Ashleigh Gunter, president of Translucent Healthcare Consulting, about why changes to benefit designs and care delivery models so often trigger suspicion and failure—and the five-step change management framework that helps them succeed instead.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why health decisions feel like "one-way-door" choices, which raises the emotional stakes of any change to insurance or care delivery

✅ Why simply communicating a change is not the same thing as managing it

✅ Gunter's five steps to effective change management: great leadership, building a case for the change, finding champions, overcommunicating, and measuring and celebrating progress

✅ Why skipping implementation steps in the name of speed often gets a well-intentioned initiative labeled "disruptive" and doomed to fail

✅ How change management challenges differ on the provider organization side compared with the benefits/insurance side

✅ Why educating operational staff, not just clinical or leadership staff, is essential to a change actually taking hold

WHY THIS MATTERS

Even changes made with the best of intentions—better benefit designs, team-based care models—can fail or get management labeled "disruptive" if leaders skip the unglamorous work of building a case, finding champions, and overcommunicating. Gunter's five-step framework gives health system and employer leaders a concrete process for the implementation work that strategy alone doesn't cover.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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00:00 Introduction.

07:46 How does change management go wrong in healthcare?

08:27 "Communication [of change] in and of itself isn't change management."

10:03 What is change management?

11:06 What does great leadership look like in change management?

12:29 "Leadership sets the tone."

12:38 What makes change management so hard?

13:27 "What's the company reason to make this change happen?"

15:57 What are change champions, and why do you need to create them when changing your benefit plan?

19:18 Why is it important to overcommunicate change?

22:46 Why is it important to measure your successes and communicate those after a change?

24:14 How does change management work on the provider organization side?

28:53 "You want to ensure you are educating the operational folks."