The bad thing about being a former mathematician in my case is that the emphasis is on the word former. Sometimes I’m convinced I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned.—sort of like the concept of negative numbers. It’s funny how the mind works, or in my case goes on little vacations without telling me. This whole parabola thing came to me while I was running, and over the next few miles of my run I tried to reconstruct the formula for a parabola. No luck.
My mind shut that down and went off on something that at least sounded somewhat similar, parables. That got me to thinking, and all of a sudden I was focused on the parable of the lost sheep, the one where a sheep wanders off and the shepherd leaves his flock to go find the lost one, which brings us to where we are today.
Sheep and effort. Let’s rewind for a second. Permit me to put the patient lifecycle into physics for librarian style language—get the patient, keep the patient, lose the patient. These are the three basic boxes where providers focus resources. How well do we do in managing that lifecycle to our advantage? We have marketing and sales to get the patient, we have patients care to keep the patient. Can anyone tell me the name of the group whose job it is to lose the patient? Sorry, I should have said to not lose the patient. Freudian—actually, we probably have our pet names for the department who we fault for patients leaving.
Where do most providers spend the majority of their intellectual capital and investment dollars? Hint—watch their commercials. It’s to get the patient. Out comes the red carpet. They get escorted in with the white glove treatment. Once they’re in, the gloves come off, to everyone’s detriment. Nobody ever sees the red carpet again. A high percentage of a firm’s budget is to get the patients, and another large chuck for existing patients. Almost nothing is spent to retain exiting patients.
Existing versus exiting. Winning providers roll out the red carpet when patients exit. They do this for two reasons. One, it may cause a patient to return. Two, it changes the conversation. Which conversation? The one your ex-patient is about to have with the rest of the world. How does your firm want that conversation to go?
Pale Rhino Consulting 
Paul,
Actually being a mathematician can be advantageous if you love “game theory” and understand the math as it applies to social network theory and the development of knowledge as assets (tangible and intangible).
The difficulty with medical practice is that HIT has become extraordinary mechanical and has not yet really shifted into a thought leadership critical to supporting patient centric care and the practice of evidence based medicine.
When I worked in HIT, Digital PDP’s were used for EMR and HP servers were used for health care finance. If Hewlett and Packard and Ken Olsen (Digital) would have talked to each other and made the data relational, and found ways for the systems to talk, then health informatics would not quite be in the mess it is in today, of forced adoption.
Of course Olsen refused to see benefit of the personal computer and Hewlett and Packard did not see their company as a potential collaborator to Apple. So John Sculley drove Apple into a downturn with reductionist math and bottom line mentality. Hewlett and Packard retired and Olsen well his command and control resulted in the layoff of 130,000 people and we had a long series of mergers first Digital with Compaq and then Compaq with Hewlett Packard and Apple is now targeted the health care office market. Maybe if some people thought of math and thought through some future scenarios there would not have been so much chaos to come to the door of today.
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