Meet Julian, Partner, Consulting
Meet Julian Maiolo, one of the Partners in our Consulting team focused on health system sustainability and performance improvement.
How did your passion for healthcare start and what was the motivation for pursuing a healthcare career?
It started way back in the early 90s, after completing my Economics Degree (majoring in accounting) and as a young CPA, I started my career at a Victorian IT Bureau services company as a clinical costing consultant. With that grounding, and after establishing a solid financial and management accounting base, I landed a role at Western Hospital with a wonderful finance and hospital management team. Shortly after settling in at Western, the then Victorian government decided to amalgamate metropolitan Health services. In my case at North Western Health Care Network / Melbourne Health. It was a case of being at the right place at the right time to be involved in fast-tracking a significant consolidation of hospital management systems, functions, and people, not just within finance but across a range of corporate and clinical departments. It was a trying time in the Victorian health care system having to engage in financial and operational sustainability improvement programs, many involving significant workforce reform.
What motivated you to pursue this specialisation over other fields within the healthcare industry?
Having had exposure to the breadth of roles and engagement in the health system early in my career, opened my eyes to the wonders of hospital operations, the patient journey and the clinical, activity and financial drivers that made hospitals tick. I loved getting down and dirty with detailed costing, case-mix analysis, finding trends, engaging with clinicians and just being fascinated by the whole clinical environment. The rest was health care activity-based-costing history!
What skills and capabilities do you bring to transform health?
Having had the opportunity to be exposed to such a breadth of senior health service roles over the journey in financial, operations management and corporate services, I figure that I have a somewhat unique suite of skills and capabilities across technical, operational, and strategic perspectives of health service management. I would say my core capabilities are in financial and operational performance turnaround, systems and process improvement, patient flow and capacity management, health workforce profiling, activity-based funding models, service planning and of course clinical activity-based costing. However, one capability that I have enjoyed (for all its challenges) has been to be able to engage with confident clinicians in translating health business issues and the complexities of health finance and funding in ways that made sense to a scientific/clinical lens.
What notable achievements or initiatives have you led that have had a significant impact on healthcare outcomes?
Admittedly, achievements are in the eye of the beholder, but I would say initiatives that I have enjoyed being a part of, that I feel have influenced how we function as a health system, have mainly involved roles that have combined the engagement of clinicians and administrators in understanding and solving problems collectively. They may not have been sizeable programs of work, but I have enjoyed connecting health data in ways that improve the evidence that shows how administrative and workflow constraints affect good efficient and effective care pathways and breaking through historical customs and practice barriers that can and need to change with the current times of new technology, systems, and techniques in health delivery.
What impact are you looking to have on the sector and what is your vision for the future of healthcare?
If I had a mission, I think it would be around finding and facilitating novel ways to break through existing administrative, financial and workflow limitations of the Australian health care system so that, as a holistic system, it can ultimately operate in a more cohesive, equitable and sustainable way. In saying that, I see most of the issues that the sector is looking to resolve are largely focused on short-term fixes, some of the work I would like to be involved in would be to see if there are ways to elevate some of the business and investment decisions which have a long term return on investment that does truly change the way our health system is better informed and delivers care in the most appropriate, effective and sustainable settings. To do that, we need to develop information, evidence and evaluation frames that measure the benefits of innovation and proposition their value in different ways across a wider horizon. I am confident that we have the capability and ideas within Deloitte to make this impact, it's just about making sure we find ways to bring these fresh, innovative, and practical approaches to clients that are different and convincing.
