At the HFM conference in Tucson, Susan Barraclough, director of food and nutrition services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, spoke about some of the topics she feels will be challenging operators in he future. Here, she talks about what healthcare operators need to prepare for.
At the recent HFM conference in Tucson, healthcare foodservice operators talked about the challenges and opportunities facing them in this continually changing field. Susan Barraclough did some crystal-ball gazing and suggests what operators should prepare themselves for in the years to come.
“We are in the process of blue-skying about where we want to be and what—and who—is going to help us get there. What is healthcare going to look like? How can we redesign and strategize ourselves to continue to be leaders in delivering patient care? And what is that patient care going to look like?
We need to think now about what we need 10 years from now, so that we can prepare our infrastructures for those changes.
There will be a different level of technology than there is right now. Patients will be a group that is much more acclimated to using technology. So while we may say that most of our patients are not able to use technology, in 2017 that will not be the case.
I see flexibility certainly as a huge thing. On-demand service could look very different than how on-demand service looks today. I see a lot more diversity and ingredient ethnicity in the foods we offer because of the diverse client that we have. Customers are going to demand it.”