The Wall Street Journal on the sad, sickening reality of unprofitable hospitals. The situation is only going to get worse as hospitals who have come to rely on investments to supplement operating margins no longer can.
Best line: “Shutting down unprofitable operations and expanding profitable ones is a common business, but nonprofit hospital systems aren’t ordinary businesses.”
12 Self-Evident Health Care Truths from the ever-spot-on Dr. Richard Reece.
Dan Pink highlights a recent Barron’s interview with Jeremy Grantham—he was one of the first to warn of a credit crisis a few years ago. Mr. Grantham explains what got us into this fix (italics added):
I ask myself, “Why is it that several dozen people saw this crisis coming for years?” I described it as being like watching a train wreck in very slow motion. It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citi and even [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke — none of them seemed to see it coming.
I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained — but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.
So it’s more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.
If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don’t suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.
So we kept putting organization people — people who can influence and persuade and cajole — into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don’t have those skills.
It reminds me of micro-level health care thinking. So if you don’t have any creatives/weird ones/right-brainers in your c-suite, the opportunity is now upon. Black swans happen. How is your management team dealing with the reality of (significantly more) difficult health care times ahead? Diversity is a start (read: people that think differently than you!).
Patient satisfaction is all the rave in health care.
Ahem, finally.
PSFK brings news of Best Buy’s effort to incorporate customer wants into its products:
The giant electronics retailer has been working on a program that actively incorporates customer feedback into the design process of future products. The “Blue Label” line features notebook computers from Toshiba and HP that come with ideas sourced from Best Buy client input.
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It’s great to see a large cooperation like Best Buy being flexible, responsive and actually paying attention to the real needs of people.
It certainly is great. The real needs of people. Hospitals should be doing the same thing. Start a Patient Experience Force today. Not a task force, a force: a group of patients (past and present) tasked with making your hospital’s experience the best it can be.
From I4U News:
“As the leading consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy has millions of interactions with consumers each year. We listened to our customers and learned that they wanted more from the feature set on available laptops so we went directly to manufacturers to fix that,” said Wendy Fritz, senior vice president of computing, Best Buy.
Why can’t hospitals replicate such a program for its services? They can, and should.
Ask the Force everything. Experiences with parking, navigating your facilities, interactions with physicians and employees, services offered, billing…etc.
Oh, and then exploit their opinions to make your health care facility better. It’s that simple.
Principle #35: We will involve patients in all of our patient experience decision making (which, by the way, is almost all of them).
Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend, Indiana is celebrating a long string of successes at building innovation and R&D into day-to-day operations. Hospital CEO Phil Newbold explains, “Healthcare is one of the only industries left that hasn’t embraced innovation. Yet it can lead to improved patient compliance and outcomes. Our ultimate goal is for our surrounding community to become the healthiest in America. Building a team of innovative problem solvers at Memorial is the key.”
They even utilize the Tom Peters WOW Project methodology.
Ahhh, heaven on Earth.
I’m tired of bailouts. I’m sure you are, too.
I don’t think we’ve reached the crossroads quite yet, but the financial craziness certainly has moved up health care’s judgement day.
The ramifications of the credit crisis are/will be many. Here’s one that’s good: sustainability.
PSFK:
A morsel of sanity comes from David A. Rosenberg, the North American Economist for Merrill Lynch. Instead of some horrible economic apocalypse, he forecasts a near future of frugality, where people concentrate on paying off their debts, and live a simpler life.
The meat, via Paul Kedrosky (and a few others):
As far as I know, there are only two ways to eliminate debt. You either walk away from it, which people obviously are doing, which is why we got these write-downs and these foreclosures, or you pay it down. I think people with a FICO score that they are concerned about are going to pay that down. That means that the savings rate is going to be forced higher. This, again, is going to be very, very disinflationary. It means that fashions are going to change. It means frugality is going to set in. We’re going to be living in smaller houses, driving smaller cars and living more frugally. It’s not going to be the end of the world; it’s going to be a necessary process to truly embark on getting the balance sheets down to more comfortable levels so that we can actually embark on the next cycle.
A question and a thought. From the hospital’s perspective, what does a frugal America mean for health care spending? Answering that question may be a good task for the planning departments in hospitals where capital projects have been pulled because of the credit freeze.
This, though, could also be a backdoor to sustainable health care. A more reasoned America may very well begin to reduce health care spending at the “America’s health care system” level. Slow and gradual would be the desirable approach to such thoughts of reduced growth. Because if the financial crisis is any indication of how a requsite pullback in health care spending will occur, we know this: it will be long and painful.
Health care has been on an unfettered growth trajectory for a while now and that makes me nervous. Nervous because of 1) an historical financial situation; 2) stories of health care providers cutting jobs; and 3) my cohort and I are leaving school to enter the job market.
Because at a moment of obviousness, it just isn’t. Read about the issues at this hospital system (link via Kevin MD). Dr. Robert E. Khoo offers some steps to success:
What should Memorial do? It could start by listening and responding to physician and nursing concerns, better organize its system of care delivery and health information, focus on the patient not on budget cuts and not bow to pressure from its headquarters in Orange County. The delivery of health care is unique to this community. We are underserved, and the problem is growing.
Sounds simple. Message: Make delivering health care easier, not more difficult. Often it’s not this easy, but sometimes it is.
