St. Joseph’s Health System (SJHS) is one of Canada’s largest integrated health systems offering services in acute medicine and surgical care, specialty mental health, post-acute and rehabilitation care, long-term care, hospice care, and home care. In 2025, three of SJHS’s member organizations, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, St. Joseph’s Villa, and St. Joseph’s Home Care are renewing their joint-strategic plan. In considering the needs of our community, the forces disrupting healthcare delivery, and our founding mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a March 2025 article published in Harvard Business Review by senior editor Kevin Evers titled, The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, inspired us to think differently about the future.

Unlike one-hit wonder music artists, Evers submits that Taylor Swift (TS) is among the megastars who constantly reinvent themselves to remain relevant from generation to generation. To be consistently relevant Evers argues that companies and industries need to think like Swift, who considers four strategic territories:

1. Targeting untapped markets
2. Finding opportunities for stickiness
3. Maintaining productive paranoia
4. Adapting to radical shifts in platforms

In reading Evers account of how Swift used each area to her advantage, SJHS leadership asked, “How do we reinvent our system of care so we can always remain relevant to the patients we serve, while responding to the profound changes the population at large is facing?”

The following section summarizes Evers perspective on how Swift uses each territory to her advantage and the challenging questions it ignited St. Joe’s to ask.  

Swift: TS doesn’t adhere to traditional music industry customs by sticking to only one genre or one type of song writing. Her country music peers often tell stories about marriage, kids and beer drinking whereas TS skillfully weaves between pop and country telling stories about her own observations as a young teen and now adult. TS also looks for new audiences by partnering with musicians and producers like Drake, Max Martin, and their respective record companies. 

SJHS: SJHS operates a large acute care hospital. Hospitals are often seen as the hub of our health system and get the most attention from patients and governments. Yet SJHS has assets along the continuum of care including home and long-term care. TS challenges us to not only think of one market, hospital patients, but to consider other markets, like patients at home or in the community, to grow and improve our impact. TS also challenges our thinking about how to balance different patient needs. There is a requirement in our community to serve the basic medicine needs of the homeless, while also offering innovative services in robotic surgery. In TS’s world, that is not an “or” choice, but an “and” possibility. TS’s ability to skillfully balance pop and country audiences illustrates we can do both through direct service offerings and strategic partnerships.

Territory #2: Finding Opportunities to Create Stickiness

Swift: When TS entered the music industry the relationship between artists and fans was changing due to the variety of emerging options fans were being offered. To be constantly relevant, TS builds lifelong relationships with fans compared to other artists that only focus on the transaction of selling songs. This relationship means creating a meaningful connection through quality lyrics and personal attachment, so her fans think of her as a person and artist, and not just a singer pushing out track after track.

SJHS: Unlike highly acute tertiary and quaternary hospitals that offer important but very procedure-based care, SJHS’s system is designed to offer patient care services from birth to death. However, with emerging customer demand and more private pay options becoming available in Canada, head winds are coming. TS’s focus on creating customer loyalty by offering a high-quality product based on shared values is pushing us to ask: what is our value offering, and how do we create stickiness not only with patients and families, but as an employer of choice given healthcare workers can find employment anywhere in the world? 

Territory #3: Maintaining Productive Paranoia

Swift: TS knows that music fans can easily move onto other artists. TS never rests on her past success and is hyper-focused on producing new and improved content. TS’s new content however must remain genuine to who she is as an artist, so her fans stick around per territory #2.

SJHS: As populations increase and age, daily pressures on healthcare operations can get difficult. Whether it is assigning an ER patient a hospital bed, finding a post-acute patient a long-term care home, or connecting a home patient to a visiting nurse, leaders can fall into the daily grind of operations and innocently accept the mediocrity of the system. TS is teaching us to be paranoid with operational excellence and an improvement mindset that ensures the patient experience is one that is innovative, of high quality and trustworthy.

Territory #4: Adapting to Shifts in Platforms

Swift: TS took advantage of the digital age by leveraging streaming to distribute her music while also using social media to connect her fans to her message. TS’s approach to digital allows her to use digital algorithms to release more music to more audiences faster. By adopting emerging platforms (territory #4), she is also enabling her productivity (territory #3). 

SJHS: SJHS has access to electronic health record, virtual care and administrative IT system platforms. However, to date we have likely underutilized the rich amount of data available to us. In Canada, policy makers and funders are slow to adopt and fund emerging clinical technologies. To be relevant going forward, Swift challenges us to think about how we invest in technology and leverage the associated data systems to build new algorithms that will help us reinvent the model of care. 

Evers notes that while Swift works within four strategic territories, there is a common thread between them: her core principles as a person and artist. This is an important takeaway for healthcare leaders who can be distracted by chasing the next big thing.  While SJHS is obliged to consider new innovations, we must align those efforts with our core mission to serve the most marginalized. For innovations without ethics would not match our mission.

Once our strategic plan is launched later this year, it is our hope that our community, physicians and staff will see the plan as both reinventing healthcare while remaining relevant to today’s population health needs and the Sisters’ mission. And if we are successful in doing so, Evers, Harvard Business Review and Taylor Swift will deserve some of the credit.

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