From advents in automation to the realities of a distributed workforce, a new era of work has dawned—and with it, a new style of teamwork. This is part of a series exploring Deloitte’s Modern Teams methodology and the nonlinear, diverse, multifunctional teams that put humanity at the center to drive meaningful business outcomes.
By now, we’ve all heard this story countless times: COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the world shut down, and healthcare was suddenly forced to pivot dramatically. But no matter how many times we process that familiar narrative, the reality is that many of the most critical stories of the last two years are only beginning to be told—and, for many organizations, are still unfolding in real time.
Nowhere has that been truer than in the healthcare industry, as well as in the adjacent industries that support it. That includes AT&T and Moderna, two companies in decidedly different sectors that Covid managed to thrust into a very similar situation: Needing to innovate and adapt to help save lives. For these two organizations, Covid wasn’t just about inventory disruption or brick-and-mortar closures; rather, their deep involvement in healthcare meant their products and services would be critical to helping countless people around the world.
Both AT&T and Moderna set out to achieve extraordinary things. And to get extraordinary results, each company turned to a similar approach: The construction of multidisciplinary modern teams.
AT&T: Expanding Healthcare Beyond Hospital Walls
These days, it’s easy to forget that remote healthcare was not a tangible or accessible option for most Americans just three years ago. Healthcare providers simply didn’t have enough infrastructure or consistent demand for large-scale support of digital-first, remote healthcare capabilities.
Covid would, of course, forever shift that paradigm. Before the pandemic forced remote options, AT&T and Deloitte were working independently on digital-first care options to improve patients’ overall healthcare journeys and aiming to ensure equitable care for countless American households.
The battle for equitable care has been a long-standing and pervasive one. Roughly a third of all Americans live in “healthcare deserts,” or areas lacking adequate access to primary care providers, hospitals, and trauma centers. Worse yet, many of those same geographic areas also lack the digital infrastructure required to even consider remote care. This was already a glaring problem for American healthcare before Covid, but the pandemic’s brutal nature magnified the issue exponentially: Suddenly remote care was more necessary than ever, and the populations who needed it the most had the least opportunity to access it.
So once Covid hit, delivering digital-first care options morphed from “important” to “mission-critical.” Priority one was developing a wide range of tools and platforms designed to enable high-quality, remote digital care that could still reach deep into these healthcare deserts. Remote treatment relies on stable connectivity—and equitable care means connectivity for all.
“Our perspective was that whatever solution we put into place, connectivity needs to be a part of it already,” says Zee Hussain, AT&T’s senior vice president for Enterprise Markets.
Such solutions would need to be responsibly rushed, especially for vulnerable and remote populations that struggle with healthcare access. This meant understanding potential solutions—and their impacts—from every angle.
AT&T was providing connectivity for remote care solutions in hospitals and patients’ homes before the pandemic. Some of these solutions tapped into FirstNet®, the nationwide public safety broadband network built specifically for America’s first responders and the extended public safety community. But demand for remote care dramatically increased as a result of Covid. In response, AT&T leaned into its “360-degree relationship” with Deloitte, casting the net far and wide to capture a talented team consisting of subject matter specialists in every area needed to expand virtual care solutions.
“This approach was our mechanism for bringing the right brains in the room to get that degree of collaboration,” says John Levis, principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP.
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Zee Hussain
Senior Vice President Global Business at AT&T
Listen to a conversation segment between Dan Helfrich, Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, and a team member.
Dan Helfrich: “You’ve done such a great job at illuminating the dimensions of so many stakeholders impacted by the situation and ultimately by the solution, in the case of healthcare and the case of this solution – in particular governance, first responders, care givers and hospitals, the hospital systems themselves. That kind of modern problem we think deserves a modern team and a modern team as I know you believe is a diverse team… I know diversity is a big passion of yours. How in this context do you think the importance of diversity informing the team, the different types of representation that the team we assemble together and how that hopefully is creating better outcomes?”
Zee Hussain:“I know both of us believe in the fact that diversity is not only the right thing but it’s right for business, and I don’t think you can find a better example than our collaboration. We’re a technology company and you all have tremendous technology chops, we could easily put the smartest people in the room to come up with best in class technology solution. But that technology solution doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have adoption, if it’s full of friction, if the clinicians, the doctors, nurses, the patients don’t see the value in it.”
This work wasn’t meant to produce one specific solution—rather, it was a collaboration to generate a wide range of devices, services, platforms, and interfaces that enable remote care at every intersection point. The work has been both comprehensive and equitable—a direct result of how AT&T and Deloitte built the modern teams behind it.
“We’ve seen more innovation in the last two years within healthcare than the two decades prior,” Hussain says. “It's all focused on the patient. I don't think there's any turning back.”
Moderna: Patient safety first, no matter what
By spring 2020, eyes around the world were watching Moderna’s every move as one of a handful of companies in the race to develop a Covid vaccine.
But along with the countless complexities of rapid vaccine creation and production, Moderna had to consider something that society at large treated as an afterthought: How to deploy an adverse event-monitoring platform to account for patients’ physical reactions, side effects, or hospitalizations—at a colossal scale, in a very short timeframe, and with advanced artificial intelligence and language translation capabilities to make the tool both efficient and broadly accessible. Establishing such an innovative solution would take time Moderna and the people depending on its vaccine did not have.
Moderna’s pharmacovigilance team considered their options. Deployment speed and scale were obviously critical, but nothing could become more important than Moderna’s perennial north star: Patient health and safety.
“That’s your guiding light,” says Jane Carroll, vice president of pharmacovigilance operations at Moderna. “It helps guide all of your decision-making. Then you’re never going to make a decision, or go down a pathway, where you know you could have a risk for how we’re looking at safety data.” The conversation couldn’t focus on how to rush a solution to market. Rather, it would need to answer, “How do we meet our product and safety standards in a fraction of the time?”
With the help of Deloitte’s software engineering team’s experience and technology, Moderna set up an accessible, equitable, and comprehensive adverse event case management solution, ElevateSafetyTM, in just four months—a previously unthinkable achievement. The key, according to Carroll, was in how Moderna approached the tool’s development: Instead of a standard pharmaceutical approach of moving monolithically from one state of development to the next, Moderna attacked the issue in a highly agile way. Leveraging the ElevateSafetyTM platform developed by Deloitte’s software engineering team, Moderna was able to deploy the vast majority of the required capability in a fraction of the time.
In many ways, Moderna was primed for the moment: It has always prioritized finding talent with innovative, entrepreneurial, and resilient mindsets. That kind of thinking was the backbone of Moderna’s unprecedented Covid response.
“The right talent and team is critical,” says Carroll. “It’s all about pivoting fearlessly. It’s about questioning convention. … Remember that you can think and act differently at this company than you ever have before.”
Jane Carroll
VP of Pharmacovigilance Operations at Moderna
Listen to a conversation segment between Dan Helfrich, Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, and a team member.
Dan Helfrich: “I do know from people I know at Moderna and my Deloitte teammates who work there that there is a phrase called the Moderna Mindset that I know applies to how employees operate differently. Could you share a little more about what you learned about the Moderna Mindset and how it applies specifically to this moment?”
Jane Carroll:”The Moderna Mindset – you have values, and the values are the way that we operate – we’re gonna be bold, we’re gonna be collaborative. But the Moderna Mindset is the ‘how’ – how do you do that? I remember the day that the mindsets…were shared…and it helped me feel so unapologetic for having good ideas, pushing them through, being the woman I wanted to be in business…The way that the industry has always thought about data-based implementation is sort of all or nothing… One of our mindsets is about questioning convention so just because that’s what industry has always done it, can we do it different? Can we break apart the problem different?”
In many ways, the pandemic shined a light on what makes Moderna different than the rest of its industry—and the word is out. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Moderna has seen an influx of new team members looking for a change.
“I think most of the people here at Moderna—doing these kinds of projects—are people who are fully committed to innovative approaches” says Suzanne Tracy, head of digital innovation in Moderna’s pharmacovigilance operations. “We just don’t want that as an impediment anymore. There’s something bigger, better out there that we know we can achieve—and we just do it.”
In these two organizations, teamwork spurred solutions that will have a global impact by improving health access, equity, and the patient experience. AT&T’s network and connectivity solutions, paired with Deloitte’s systems integration capabilities, are shaping a virtual healthcare future. Moderna’s collaboration with Deloitte established a first-of-its-kind automated case processing solution, driving innovation and transforming Pharmacovigilance Operations, while delivering on Moderna’s commitment to patient safety and enabling the highest standards of quality and compliance.
Over the last two years, the world has learned just how fast things can change. What’s important is how these companies and their teams chose to respond in the face of the unknown. “I think what builds great teams is vulnerability,” says Carroll. “Vulnerability brings trust—real, authentic trust.”
And when lives depend on the output of these teams, trust is everything. That’s what a team is all about.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Deloitte.
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