Sometimes it’s easier if I simply shoot myself in the foot rather than having to wait around for others to do it.  Permit me to begin with a disclaimer; my comments and questions almost always pertain to the non-clinical side of healthcare.

We’ve spent time discussing how we take an industry that in many respects functions on a 0.2 business model and transform it rather quickly to one comfortable operating in a 2.0 model—effective and efficient.

So, while that’s going on, what other things are underway which will impact that transformation?  Reform is one.  What will be the impact?  Nobody knows, but it may not be pretty.  One of the largest implications of reform is that the industry is being forced to integrate.  For example, it’s one thing to build a phone company.  There is a whole new order of magnitude of difficulty when one phone company has to integrate seamlessly with all of the other phone companies.

That integration is being driven by hundreds of different teams of vendors, standards setters, certifiers, and networkers, each having its own goals and working in their own vacuum chamber.

As I’ve studied this business problem for the past few years it becomes more and more apparent that something has been overlooked.  It gets it share of lip service, however unless it is addressed concurrently with reform and EHR, EHR will prove to be of such low value as to stymie people who later have to justify the expenditure.

It’s the missing link, the customer.  I know customer is not the politically correct term in healthcare because it sort of blemishes the notion that nobody is in this for the money.  We’d rather talk about patients.  Patients are on the clinical side, customers are on the business side.  Healthcare needs systems that work for both.

Where does customer care, customer relationship management (CRM), and customer equity management (CEM) fit within the realm of EHR?  The wrong answer to this question could set your EHR effort back years and millions.

The following link takes you to a presentation of mine on CRM and discusses the merits of looking at treating customers via CEM.

 http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/good-CEM-deck

I am curious to learn how you are incorporating the customer into your transition.