Fire Your Chief Innovation Officer!
Yesterday I stood on stage at the SUNY UPSTATE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL Health Justice Conference and looked out at a room full of brilliant and well-meaning professionals. These are people who have dedicated their lives to fixing the broken machinery of American healthcare. The energy was palpable. The slides were slick. The buzzwords were flying. Everyone was talking about "additive" solutions. We need new pathways, apps, AI, engagement.
In between talks I was speaking to a group and asked a question that sucked the air out of the room.
"How many of you have a Chief Innovation Officer?"
About half the hands went up.
"How many of you have a Chief Friction Officer?"
Silence. Not a single hand.
We have a fundamental problem in how we approach health technology. We are obsessed with addition. We treat healthcare strategy like a hoarding situation where we keep piling new solutions on top of old problems without ever clearing the clutter.
But as a surgeon, I can tell you that addition is rarely what saves a life. Extraction does. Removing the infection. Removing the tumor. Removing the blockage.
It became the backbone of my talk yesterday. It is the only narrative that matters for 2026. We do not 'need' more innovation. We need a Friction Audit.
The "Addition Bias" Trap
Psychologists call this "addition bias." When humans are asked to improve an object or a situation, they overwhelmingly prefer to add something rather than subtract something. In healthcare, this bias is fatal.
We add a digital check-in tool to "streamline" the front desk. But we forget to remove the clipboard of paper forms. Now the patient has to do both. That is not innovation. That is friction.
We add an AI scribe to the exam room to capture the conversation. But we do not remove the requirement for the physician to click through forty-seven tabs to bill for the visit. That is not progress. That is administrative burden.
Innovation without subtraction is just suffocation.
The Friction Audit: A New Standard
Yesterday in my talk I proposed a radical shift in strategy. I challenged every health system leader, startup founder, and trainee in the room to pause their product roadmap and conduct a Friction Audit. This is not a bug hunt. This is a strategic review of the "invisible walls" we build around care.
A true Friction Audit looks at three specific layers.
1. Digital Friction
This is the most obvious and the most ignored. I am not talking about a clunky user interface. I am talking about the "Login Wall." If a patient needs three different passwords to view their labs, message their doctor, and pay their bill, you have failed. The most advanced algorithm in the world is useless if the patient cannot remember their username.
Read: The Cost of Fragmented Patient Portals
2. Physical Friction
We often design digital tools for a world that does not exist. I shared the story of the "unplowed driveway" in rural New York. You can have the most advanced "Hospital at Home" monitoring kit in the world. It can be powered by the most sophisticated AI. But if that patient lives up a steep hill in a snowstorm and their driveway is unplowed, the ambulance cannot get to them when the AI detects a crisis. Friction is not just in the code. It is in the infrastructure.
Data: The Broadband Gap in Rural America
3. Cognitive Friction
This is the silent killer. We are asking sick, scared, and stressed patients to act as their own project managers. We ask them to coordinate between the specialist and the primary care doctor. We ask them to chase down prior authorizations. Every time we force a patient to understand the complexity of our org chart, we are introducing cognitive friction that leads to burnout and dropout.
The Job Description: Chief Friction Officer
If I were running a major health system today, I would hire a CFO. But not the financial kind.
I would hire a Chief Friction Officer.
Their job description would be simple. They would have zero budget for buying new technology. Their only power would be the power of the veto and the power of the delete key. Their primary Key Performance Indicator (KPI) would be Time to Care.
Their job is to ruthlessly hunt down every policy, every click, every form, and every redundant question that slows the patient down or burns the clinician out. They are the guardian of flow.
If we had this role in place five years ago, we would not be facing the crisis staring us down next week.
The Ultimate Friction: The January 30 Telehealth Cliff
We have a real-time example of "Government-Mandated Friction" happening right now. In just 10 days, on January 30, 2026, the Medicare telehealth flexibilities regarding the "originating site" are set to expire.
We are about to revert to a rule (unless Congress acts) that says a Medicare patient cannot receive telehealth services from their home. They must travel to a designated "originating site" (usually a clinic or hospital) to get on a video call with a specialist.
Think about the absurdity of this friction.
We are legally forcing an eighty-year-old woman with mobility issues to drive forty minutes on icy roads just to sit in a room and look at a screen. We have the technology to treat her in her living room. We have the connection. But we have a policy wall that says "No."
This is the "Telehealth Cliff." It puts over a third of rural Medicare beneficiaries at risk of losing access to virtual care overnight.
A Chief Innovation Officer would try to solve this by building a better scheduling app for the clinic, or a new patient engagement tool.
A Chief Friction Officer would recognize that the drive is the barrier and fight to remove the rule. Or better yet develop a community strategy to bring transportation into the care plan, and make it a 'clinical necessity'.
Read: January 30th Cliff
The Bottom Line
Stop looking for the next "Agentic AI" to add to your tech stack. Stop looking for the next shiny object at CES.
Look for the friction you can subtract.
If your algorithm can diagnose a rare disease with 99% accuracy, but your patient cannot log in to see the result, you have not innovated anything. You have just built a very expensive wall.
-Dr. Matt\
Dr. Matt believes technology can erase the borders that limit access to care. This vision is the heart of her National Best Seller, The Borderless Healthcare Revolution.
If your organization is drowning in "solutions" but starving for results, you do not need another consultant to tell you what to buy. You need someone to tell you what to delete.
I am opening two spots next month to serve as a Fractional Chief Friction Officer for growth-stage health tech companies or progressive health systems. We will identify your three biggest barriers to care and dismantle them.
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