CEM

You Can’t Fix Stupid

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I spent a summer in Weaverville, North Carolina, just outside of Asheville. (I couldn’t find it on the map either.) That summer, I was the head wrangler at Windy Gap, a summer camp for high school kids. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a horse, much less ridden one, so I guess that’s why they put me in charge. I thought that maybe if I dressed the part that would help. I bought a hat and borrowed a pair of cowboy boots from a friend; the boots were a half size too small, and I spent the better part of the first night stuffing sticks of butter down them trying to get them off my swollen feet.

The ranch’s full-time hand taught us how saddle the horses and little bit about how to ride. In the mornings we had to collect the horses from the fields, bring them into the corral, and saddle them. The other wranglers would ride out to the field to bring in the horses, while I being the least experience of the wranglers would race after them in my running shoes trying to coax them back to the barn. We would take the children for a breakfast ride along a mountain path where we would let them rest and cook them a breakfast of sausage and scrambled eggs.

One morning a group of fifteen high school girls was sitting on the fence of the corral.  I walked up behind them carrying two saddle bags filled with the breakfast fare. I slung the saddlebags over the top rail of the fence, and hoping to make a good impression I placed one hand on the rail and vaulted myself over. I landed flat on my back smack dab in the middle of the pile of what horses produce when they’re done eating—so much for the good impression.

I brushed myself off and saddled my horse. The moment I gripped the reins the horse reared on two legs, made a dash for the fence and jumped it in one motion. I could tell the high school girls were impressed as I flew by them. Both of my arms were wrapped around the horse’s neck, and I had my hands locked in a death grip. I yelled, “whoa” and stop”, only to learn that the horse didn’t speak English. The horse raced the two hundred yards to the dining hall, stopped on a dime, and raced back to the corral, as the girls continued to cheer. One final leap, and I was back where I started; on the ground, in the corral, looking up at the girls. I took a bow and quickly remounted my steed. The full-time ranch hand came over and instructed me rather loudly, “You can’t let the horse do that. You have to show the horse that you’re in charge.” After that piece of wisdom he grabbed my horse by its bit, pulled its head down, and bit a hole in my horse’s ear. I’m not sure what kind of in an impression it made on my horse. I guarantee you it made an impression on me.

Horses aren’t very intelligent, but they know when you don’t know what you’re doing, when you’re bluffing—dressing like a cowboy didn’t even fool the girls, much less my horse—I guess he hadn’t seen many westerns. Here we go—you had to know where this was headed.

Patients are a lot like horses. (I just Googled that phrase and it appears you heard it here first.) You can’t fix stupid. Putting lipstick on a pig won’t make it any more attractive. Patients don’t like being ridden; don’t like being saddled with extraneous fees. One example—mobile phone providers offer many pricing options. They know their customers can’t predict how many minutes they will use. They penalize their customers for using too much time and they reap the benefits if they don’t use all of their time. Fifty percent of mobile phone providers’ income derives from those fees.

Customers know when a company doesn’t know what it’s doing—those companies who require their customers to sign a contract in order to prevent them from defecting. Do you have a gym membership? Their favorite customers buy long-term memberships but rarely visit the club. That allows health clubs to sell more memberships than they can accommodate, and they make it difficult for their customers cancel the contract. Long-term contracts almost guarantee poor service; after all, it’s not like the customer can up and leave.

Patients know when a company is bluffing. That’s why most people hate calling. Want to really get on someone’s nerves—make sure the recorded message mentions that the call may be recorded for purposes of quality. If it’s me on the phone, that’s when I know that I’m really going to have a difficult time getting the results I want. It appears that there is an inverse correlation between how much a firm states that it wants to help a patient and the amount of help the patient actually receives. Given a choice, sometimes I’d rather be the horse.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

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Dinner’s warm, it’s in the dog–Patient Expectations

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Let’s see what we can somehow tie this to patients; I couldn’t resist using the title. The phrase came from my friend’s wife. She’d said it to him after he and I came home late from work one night, he having forgotten his promise to call her if we were to be late. Apparently, she hadn’t forgotten his promise. We walked into the kitchen.  “Dinner’s warm—it’s in the dog.”  She walked out of the kitchen.  I think that’s one of the best lines I’ve ever heard.

He was one of my mentors. We spent a lot of time consulting on out-of-town engagements. I remember one time I took out my phone to call my wife when he grabbed me by the wrists and explained I shouldn’t do that. We had just finished working a 10 or 12 hour day of consulting and had stopped by a bar to grab a steak and beer. I remember there was loud music playing. When I inquired as to why I shouldn’t call he explained.

“When your wife is chasing three children around the house and trying to prepare dinner, she doesn’t want to hear music and laughter and clinking beer glasses. She needs to know that you are having as bad a night as she is. So call her from outside, and make it sound like tonight’s dinner would be something from a vending machine.”

“But it’s raining,” I whimpered. Indeed it was, but seeing the wisdom in his words I headed out and made my call.

So, back to the dinner and the dog, and the steak and the phone call. In reality, they are both the same thing. It all comes down to Expectations. In healthcare it comes down to patient expectations.

PEM can be a number of things; Patient experience management, Patient equity management, and Patient expectation management. In this instance, we are discussing the latter. A set of expectations existed in both scenarios. One could argue as to whether the expectations were realistic—and one did argue just that—only to learn that neither of our wives considered the realism of their expectations to be a critical success factor. In that respect, the two women about whom I write are a lot like patients, their expectations are set, and they will either be met or missed.

Each time expectations are missed, their expectationbar is lowered. Soon, the expectation bar is set so low it’s difficult to miss them, but miss them we do. What happens next? Patients leave. They leave and go somewhere they know will also fail to meet their expectations. However, they’d rather give their money to someone who may disappoint them than somebody who continued to disappoint them.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

Does your hospital have ID–Innovation Deficiency?

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When certain things reach their expiration date, no second-guessing is required. Shelf life has transformed into half-life. Milk is a good example, one that involves several of the senses. For starters, the dairy industry offers a great hint by printing the date right on the label. Smell is another indicator, unfortunately we don’t always trust that first whiff, and we take a sip thinking that it can’t be all that bad. Fortunately, our taste buds never let us down. If the milk has turned, there is a visceral, almost violent desire to spew it forth and then shave your tongue. Finally, if the consistency is such that it can be eaten with a fork, toss that puppy. Bananas turn black. Cheeses and breads sprout beards, speckled with tinctures of blues and greens. Tomatoes leak, oranges deflate, grapes wrinkle, and juice ferments.

On the other hand it’s more difficult to know when non-perishables have outlived their usefulness. Light bulbs burn out, batteries die, and DVDs freeze. The same thing happens in business; technology gets outdated, service providers lose their appeal, patients have other choices, and business processes no longer apply to today’s markets. The difference is that it’s much easier to see when a light bulb burns out than it is to recognize when 10 year-old business processes aren’t cutting it.

Sometimes ideas just wear out, and new ideas aren’t forthcoming. This happens a lot, especially as relates to customers—for purposes of this discussion we use customers to mean patients and physicians. There’s a scientific name for this phenomenon; Innovation Customer Experience Deficiency, ICED. How can you tell if your hospital’s been ICED? It’s fairly simple. If you can pinpoint the year when you last changed how you approached your customers you’ve been ICED. Customer experience management (CEM) should be occurring continually. If it is occurring continually under a design that hasn’t been updated continually something is out of sync. Do you use the same CEM systems you used 5 or 10 years ago? Have you added new processes or services during that period? If so, you’ve been ICED.

It’s sad to watch. Good hospitals wither away to upstart competitors simply because they have no new ideas about how to handle their customers. Reducing average handle time is not an innovation. Decreasing the rate of call abandonment, should not be considered a new idea. Many hospitals have lost the ability to color outside the lines—some never had the ability. It’s shameful. CEOs and other executives can be seen sneaking in to work early so they aren’t seen by their employees—their briefcases are filled with old ideas, some on a floppy disk they picked up at some useless symposium a decade ago. Their customers are making fun of them on YouTube. Even their dog is embarrassed and is thinking of moving in with some other executive, one who isn’t afraid to think.

The symptoms are classic. Unfortunately, if left unchecked, the deficiency can spread throughout the organization. Soon, billing doesn’t care if it has all the required line items. Marketing figures, why care, since our stuff isn’t innovative anyway. The front doors stay locked, because the employees don’t want the customers coming in and teasing them.

Our clients ask us, what can we do? “We’re still working on the same problems I was faced with when I was a CSR,” replied Stan Watson, Healthy Pro’s, vice president of customer care. “We’ve just added another T-1 line,” stated Stan’s boss Nancy Peppermill. “We do that about every six months or so and finally everything starts settling down.”

This is why we created the Baltimore Exposition for the Innovation Customer Experience Deficiency, BE ICED. BE ICED is a two-day exposition. It’s being held the third Monday in October, and it ends the previous Friday, that way, you still have your weekend available. How do you know if this exposition is for you? If you are still trying to fix yesterday’s problem, or you can’t color outside the lines, or find that all of your peers are thinking outside the box while you’re still trapped inside, then you should consider joining us.

BE ICED will teach you to be bold. Day one of the exposition begins with a seminar to introduce the executive to the customer. This can be very intimidating, but we will be with you every step of the way. We will walk through mock scenarios that practice the difficult skills that we feel cause ID, innovation deficiency. Once we work on those skills, we will go live. Each executive who has customer responsibilities will be driven blindfolded to an actual hospital or clinic, whereupon they will meet live customers. Executives will receive points for correctly being able to identify a customer and for interacting with the customer. Bonus points will be awarded if the executive is able to ascertain the customer’s needs and provide the right assistance. Day two will be filled with techniques to teach the executive how to cope with and hopefully eliminate ID. Yes, ID is embarrassing, but we’re here to help.

Listen to the following testimonial. Randy Johnson is the senior vice president of CEM for the medical devices conglomerate, Panache Bed Pans. Here’s what he said after completing two-day session. “We thought we knew all there was to know about how to take care of our customers. And then I realized I had ID. Panache Bed Pans was ICED. Customers would call more than once, expecting us to have answers to their questions. Why did they think we knew anything about bed pans, other than how to make them? We began to get discouraged. We would come in late, leave early, and hide under desks, so we wouldn’t have to answer the phone. Then I heard about ID. I must admit at first I was skeptical. But they placed me in a group with other people who are just as inept as I was when it came to taking care of customers, and that made me feel comfortable. After two days, that feeling that comes with having ID began to go away. Now I know how to be innovative, and I’m starting to cope with just feeling deficient.”

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

Abnormal

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I remember the first time I entered their home I was taken aback by the clutter. Spent and wet leaves and small branches were strewn across the floors and furniture. Black Hefty trash bags stood against the walls filled with last year’s leaves. Dozens of bright orange buckets from Home Depot sat beneath the windows. The house always felt cold, very cold. After a while I learned to act normally around the clutter.

There came a time however when I simply had to ask, “Why all the buckets? What’s the deal with the leaves?”

“We try hard to keep the place neat,” she replied.

“Where does it all come from?” I asked.

“The windows.”

I looked at her somewhat askance. “I’m not sure I follow,” I replied as I began to feel uneasy.

“It’s not like we like living this way; the water, the cold, the mess. It costs a fortune to heat this place.

And, the constant bother of emptying the buckets, and the sweeping of the leaves.”

“Why don’t you shut your windows? It seems like that would solve a lot of your problems.”

She looked like I had just tossed her cat in a blender.

When you see something abnormal often enough it becomes normal. Sort of like in the movie The Stepford Wives.  Sort of like Patient Relationship Management (PRM). The normal has been subsumed by the abnormal, and in doing so is slowing devouring the resources of the hospital.

Are you kidding me? I wish. It’s much easier to see this as a consultant than it is if you are drinking the Kool Aid daily. When I talk to people about a statistic that indicates that 500 people called yesterday about their bill, and everyone looks calm and collected, it makes me feel like I must be the only one in the room who doesn’t get it—again with The Stepford Wives.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

If I ask about it they always have an answer.  “Billing calls are usually around 500 a day.”  They say that with a straight face as though they are waiting to see if I will drink the Kool Aid. It’s gotten to the point where no matter how bad things get, as long as they are consistently bad, there not bad at all.

This is the mindset that enables the PRM manager (I know you don’t have one—I am being facetious) to be fooled by their own metrics. When is someone going to understand that repeatedly having thousands of people calling to tell your organization you have a problem, means you have a problem?

It would probably take less than a week to pop something on your web site, and post a YouTube video explaining how to read the bill.  Next week, do the same thing and help patients understand how to file claims and disputes—granted, you may need more than a week for this one.

Patient Relationship Management & Patient Equity Management

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Here’s a link to my deck on the above. I’d like to read your thoughts.

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

In accordance with the prophecy

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Counting me, there were six of us; college spies. Maybe that is a grammatical error; we were spies who happened to be in college. Well, maybe that’s a half-truth. We were co-op students with rather high security clearances, working at a place in the DC area which made the type of things of which Nancy Pelosi would deny having any knowledge. I was a mathematics intern—not a bad step on the rungs of the career ladder given that the dean of my math department had tried on more than one occasion to get me to change majors. Everyone I worked with had at least a PhD in math. At least I had enough firing synapses to know I would never be their intellectual peer.

During the summers, we six would report at one of the complex’s gates, flash our badges at the marine guards, make our way past the military weapons testing facilities, and head to our basement offices. At lunch time we’d break out our briefcases, and take out our tools of the trade—Frisbees, bag lunch, sun tan oil (this was in the days before anyone could spell SPF, pure Hawaiian Tropic.) Within minutes we’d be stripped down to our cutoffs, running across the field where the helicopters landed, and dripping with sweat. After lunch we’d help draft differential equations whose aim was to read target signatures sent from one of our missiles at a Soviet or Chinese aircraft. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

That was then. Now we are aging adolescents clinging woefully to rapidly fading images of summers past, whose idea of getting wasted is drinking multiple espressos. Gone are the days where we could abnegate responsibility. We matured, at least a lot of us. We’ve learned pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing. We’ve accepted it to the extent that we act like we know what we’re doing even if we don’t and, we do it.

Pretending is a skill. Guys do it all the time, secretly hoping no one will notice. People who answer your hospital phones do it too. Sometimes patients will settle for an answer; any answer. It’s sort of like bluffing in Trivial Pursuit—if you bluff with enough confidence, your opponent may not even check your answer. For some patient questions, there are three states of being; not knowing, action and completion. The goal is to move as rapidly as possible from the first state to the third. If the patient proves to be a problem, the patient care rep should finish each sentence with the phrase, “In accordance with the prophecy.”

Of course, if face-to-face interaction proves to be too much, you can always tighten up the dialog. For example;

RING …RING …

*click*

Welcome to the Patient Care Hotline.

If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press 1 repeatedly.

If you are codependent, please ask someone to press 2.

If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5 and 6.

If you are paranoid-delusional, we know who you are and what you want.

If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully to the little voice until it tells you which number to press.

If you are manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press. No one will answer.

If you are delusional and hallucinate, please be aware that the thing you are holding on the side of your head is alive and about to bite off your ear.

Thanks for calling.

The parabolic parable

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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?

Have you lost the social media turf war to your patients?

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Remember as kids trying to see how many bumble bees you could catch in a jar before you panicked and they all got lose? You couldn’t get the top all the way on and all of a sudden dozens of bees exited the jar as you raced across the field of clover. That’s how patients are. You try and catch as many as you can, but once they get out it’s over. So, here we go again. Social networking. We’ll get there in a moment.

For those old enough to remember the seventies, what are you able to recall about high school? If you’re like me, much of it’s selective. The web seems to be changing some of that. Classmates.com. Facebook. Ever notice how there are no rules? Anyone can get to anyone else. Unhindered. Uninvited.

There are those who never grew up, and there are those who never grew older–there’s a difference. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Like for instance trading emails with the girl in the red velvet dress, the one with whom you first slow danced in the ninth grade.

Then there’s the other side to the social networking coin. A darker side. Unless you happened to be among the minutia of students who gambolled care freely down the crowded halls during those four years believing that the school year book should only contain your picture, graduating high school gave you your out, gave you permission to euphemistically bury the bourgeoisie who needed burying. People who, when you were eighteen wouldn’t put you out if you were on fire, the very people who probably set you ablaze, now knock digitally on your facebook door asking to befriend you. Did I miss something here? The part where my fabebook-buddy-wannabe says, “Now that we’re grownup, forget I was a jerk in high school, ignore the fact that I was dumber than a bowl of mice”—sounds like I may have missed one or two of my twelve-step meetings. Recovery is progressing well—really.

Just because a hospital is paranoid doesn’t mean their customers don’t hate them. Poltergeists. The undead. The kind of customers you’d hope you’d never hear from. And yet, those are the very ones who bother to write about their experience. They Twitter, and blog, and YouTube your organization. Don’t take my word for it.  Run a search and see what you find.  More is being said about you than you are saying about yourself.  That means you are losing the social media turf war, you don’t control the high ground or the conversation.

Patients come back and haunt deliberately. Their haunts are reflected in lower satidfaction, fewer repeat visits, and higher churn. Isn’t technology great?

Patient Relationship Management-Master of the Jedi Order

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They don’t call me Yoda for nothing. This little rant is for those acolytes drinking the Kool Aid of disbelief, the recipe that says that one day, if we stay the course, this will all get better, those who believe that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train.
For the next few minutes try and disassociate yourself from your responsibilities at work and become a patient.  Recall a time when you’ve been a dissatisfied patient. If you’re totally honest, that simple exercise should quicken your pulse. Cold beads of sweat appear on your forehead; your palms feel a little clammy.

The transition is faster than Clark Kent in a phone booth. A mild mannered and pedestrian acolyte transformed into a right-winged, Myers-Briggs INTJ A-Type with a passion for metaphorically devouring the unfortunate person awaiting your visit.

As you think about managing the equity of your patients think about it from the perspective of the patient, goodness knows they do. That relationship is black and white—there are no shades of gray. It’s good versus evil, Yoda versus Darth Vader.

I think with most patient interactions the patients believe that the person on the other end of the line is incented to make them go away as quickly as possible and at the lowest possible expense to the provider.

For most patients, patient loyalty is a thing of the past. Who do you do business with? Why? For any product that is even close to being a commodity, I deal with the firm who I find to be the least offensive, the one that will irritate me the least. That’s why I buy cars on EBay so I never again have to hear the phrase, ‘What’s it going to take to get you into that car?” If you find yourself doing that, why is it such a stretch to believe that so many patients feel the same way? That said, could it rather naïve to believe that your firm’s current approach to patient relationship management will make any difference?

Taking Care of Patients (TCOP)

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That’s me in the back row–just kidding. There are approximately 640 muscles in the human body. Yesterday I pulled 639 of them. In anticipation of the onset of winter I’ve been ramping up my workouts, and at the moment am scarcely able to lift a pencil. I came across an article that describes the full body workout used by the University of North Carolina basketball players. It involves a ten-pound medicine ball, and 400 repetitions spread across a handful of exercises. I’m three days into it and giving a lot of thought about investigating what kind of workout the UNC math team may be using. At my son’s basketball practice last night, the parents took on the boys—they are ten. That 640th muscle, the holdout, now hurts as bad as the rest of them.

So, this morning I’m running on the treadmill, because it’s cold and the slate colored clouds look heavy with rain. While I’m running, I am watching the Military History Channel, more specifically a show on the Civil War’s Battle of Bull Run—I learned that that’s what the Yankees called it, they named the battles after the nearest river, the Rebs called it the Battle of Manassas, named after the nearest town. The historian doing the narration spoke to the wholesale slaughter that occurred on both sides. He equated the slaughter to the fact that military technology had outpaced military strategy. The armies lined up close together, elbow to elbow, and marched towards cannon fire that slaughtered them. Had they spread themselves out, the technology would have been much less effective.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss the segue. You had to know this was coming. Does your hospital have one of those designer call centers? You know the ones—wide open spaces, sky lights, sterile. Fabric swatches. The fabric of the chair matches that of the cubicle, which in turn are coordinated with the carpeting. Raised floors. Zillions of dollars of technology purring away underfoot. We have technology that can answer the call, talk to the caller, route the caller, and record the caller for that all important black hole called “purposes of quality.”

The only thing we haven’t been able to do is to find technology to solve the patient’s problems. Taking Care of Patients (TCOP).  We’ve used it to automate almost everything. If we remove all the overlaying technology, we still face the same business processes that were underfoot ten years ago. Call center technology has outpaced call center strategy. Call center technology hasn’t made call centers more effective, it’s made them more efficient. Call center strategies are geared towards efficiencies. Only when we design call center strategies around being more effective will the strategy begin to maximize the capabilities of the technologies.