I stumbled across an article on the La Brea Tar Pits.  For those unfamiliar with them, over thousands of years the gas from oil deposits close to the ground evaporated leaving the byproduct tar oozing from the ground.  As it happens, this oozing is in LA, as in Los Angeles.  To date more than three million fossils have been excavated from the tar, including fossils of saber-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths.

It made me wonder what would happen if tar pits were discovered today in other US cities. My guess is that the EPA would immediately declare the site off limits and establish it as a Superfund cleanup site.  The Feds would look into whether British Petroleum was somehow behind the leak, thinking perhaps that BP simply dumped the oil it cleaned up from the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Next we have Blockbuster, the video chain that required two trips to their store for every one use of their product.  If you are wondering why there are so many Rite Aids and CVSs in the US, I’m guessing most of them are housed in former Blockbuster buildings.  Redbox will be the next and final video chain to go bye-bye.  Maybe CVS can figure out how to squeeze a Minute Clinic into a box.

Several years ago I attended a convention on customer experience whose keynote speaker was the most recognized CEO in the cable television industry.  A reporter noted that cable television subscriptions had capped at around seventy percent, and remarked that it would not get any larger due to the number of older people who do not use technology and who did not subscribe to cable.  The reporter asked the CEO how the industry would deal with that situation.  The CEO stated “We are waiting for them to die.”

Healthcare does not have the luxury of waiting on anything.  There are those who want to skirt the issue by saying that we have patients who do not use technology, people who do not have access to the internet.  Indeed there are.  However, the converse is true and it is true in much larger numbers.  Applying technology to patient experience is not a binary trap, not an either or situation.

One of the great things about technology is that it is impartial, it does not takes sides, and it is relatively difficult to hurt its feelings.  Plus it has a great memory—it gives the same answer, the correct answer, every time to the same question.

Foresight versus hindsight.  How difficult would driving be if the only view available to the driver was the view from the rearview mirror?  Three years from now the best hospitals will look back at these discussions and wonder why not reinventing patient experience was ever an option.

Three years from now the other hospitals will look back at these discussions and wonder why reinventing patient experience was never an option.