If a blog falls in the woods and nobody reads it does it make a sound?

When basketball was invented players shot the ball into a peach basket.  When a player scored the game was halted to allow someone to bring over a ladder so the ball could be retrieved from the basket.  The game was very slow.  It was very slow for seven years until someone got the idea to cut the bottom out of the basket.

Suppose someone asks you to give them the Cliff Notes version of Patient Satisfaction.  What is the best way to respond to convey such a complex issue?

There are some 5,000 hospitals in the US.  There are some 2,500 hospitals being penalized for having poor patient satisfaction scores.  As compared to what, did anybody ask the patients?  Use a highlighter or underline this on your monitor—being in the top half of the patient sat scores does not mean that your patients are satisfied with your hospital.

To the chagrin of the ‘six sigmaists’, here is a news flash.  Shaving thirty-two seconds off of the time it takes to be admitted does not yield satisfied patients.  If making the admitting the process shorter is a good thing, would it not make sense that doing away with the patient admitting process would be a really good thing?  Maybe it is time to cut the bottom out of this peach basket.

If your hospital has not recently reinvented how it electronically interacts with patients and potential patients through a world class patient portal, it is way out of touch with how patients interact with other organizations with which they do business.

How would you like to be admitted if you were going to the hospital two days from now?  If you are like me, you would want to navigate to the hospital’s web site the evening before you are scheduled to check in.  You want to pull out your iPad, go to the web site, complete the check in and be given a room assignment.

Patient satisfaction just went up.