What is your organization’s mission, your vision, your goal?  Can you articulate it?  If yes, write it below in the space provided.

Okay.  Why do you have a mission statement?  Is its purpose merely website parsley, or is it actionable?  What does it tell you to do?  Is it something to which all of your employees can contribute?  Can you measure if your actions helped meet the mission?  Does the business strategy result from the mission statement?

Here’s one you probably haven’t thought of.  Let’s say every one of your employees puts your mission statement into action.  Does that improve your organization, or does it bring it to its knees?  Your mission statement either communicates your mission or it does not.  What does it say to your employees, to your customers?  If it does not create a message that makes you unique, fix it or dump it—or say, “We are just like those other guys down the street.”  Just because it communicates, does not make your mission sustainable.

Here are some real examples of hospital mission/vision statements.  Read them and see if you begin to understand why I think the hospital business model is in trouble.  I have not published the name of the hospital, as that is not what is important to this discussion.

Providing exemplary physical, emotional and spiritual care for each of our patients and their families

Balancing the continued commitment to the care of the poor and those most in need with the provision of highly specialized services to a broader community

Building a work environment where each person is valued, respected and has an opportunity for personal and professional growth

Advancing excellence in health services education

Fostering a culture of discovery in all of our activities and supporting exemplary health sciences research

Strengthening our relationships with universities, colleges, other hospitals, agencies and our community

Provide quality health services and facilities for the community, to promote wellness, to relieve suffering, and to restore health as swiftly, safely, and humanely as it can be done, consistent with the best service we can give at the highest value for all concerned

To participate in the creation of healthier lives within the community. * To provide healthcare services in a fiscally responsible manner which contribute to the physical, psychological, social and spiritual well being of the patients and community which it serves. * To provide assistance to the whole person in a Catholic spirit of equality and interfaith serving all regardless of age, color, creed or gender.

We are caring people operating an extraordinary community hospital.

Ensure access to superior quality integrated health care for our community and expand access for underserved populations within the community. Create a supportive team environment for patients, employees, and clinical staff.

Let’s look at some of the million dollar words in the mission statements of some highly regarded hospitals.  Ensure, foster, promote, participate, create.  Comprehensive.  Involved, responsive, collaborate, enable, facilitate, passion, best, unparalleled, .  These statements were written by well paid adults.  These statements are awful.  They are awful because they are fluff—unachievable.  They are well intentioned but meaningless euphemisms.

Here’s my attempt at writing a concise mission statement based on the business models I’ve seen.  We will buy every piece of technology and hire any specialist so we can treat any problem.

Hospital mission statements are very inclusive.  They also seem very similar.  If a perspective patient read your mission statement and read the mission statement of the hospital down the street, could they tell which one is yours?  Probably not.  Who among you has a mission statement which excludes anything?

So, let’s say your board is debating if you should buy the machine in Monty Python’s hospital skit—the machine that goes “Ping.”  Which of the mission’s goals does that support?

How do you make them better?  For starters, make them short. Very.  One writer wrote, “If I had more time, I would have written less.

Southwest Airline’s mission statement—be the low cost carrier.

Dramatic pause.  Something either contributes to the mission or it does not.  Leather seats and free lunches do not.

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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In our prior home we built a magnificent 1,600 bottle mahogany wine cellar with an in-laid brick floor, a nine-foot high antique door, a cigar humidor, and a tasting table.  We discovered that hexagonally shaped ceramic chimney flue pipes were the perfect building material.  They stacked like honeycomb and helped keep the wine chilled.

Our idea was to enjoy the wines we had collected over time.  There is a trick to being a successful wine collector—one must collect more wines than one consumes.  The principle of buying three and drinking four made our cellar always look brand new—empty.

The same principle applies to business strategy.  One must ensure that inputs exceed outputs, that cash in exceeds cash out.  Wax on—wax off.

If service “A” sells for a hundred dollars and it costs eighty dollars to deliver, that is a sustainable model.  You get to pocket twenty dollars.

If service “B” costs a million dollars a year to be able to offer the service and you can only charge eighty thousand dollars per patient, and fewer than twelve patients require the service, that model is not sustainable.

What happens next?  You have to start borrowing money from somewhere.  Often it comes from those twenty dollars you pocketed from the other services.  Then what happens?  Each time you take the profits away from service “A” to underwrite service “B” you have made both services unsustainable.

Cross-pollinate this concept across a five hundred bed hospital, a hospital whose model already requires it to offer “loss leader” services like caring for the indigent and ER and you can see the model has problems.  It may be possible to keep the model on life support by charging eight dollars for each Tylenol, but sooner or later that model will fail.

While we are at it, let’s look at what happens to service “A”.  The hospital stops performing “A” because they no longer find it profitable.  Then what?  Service “A” gets picked up by a clinic who can deliver it at a cost of forty dollars instead of the eighty it cost the hospital.

It is never the service that is the problem, it is the business model behind the service.

Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

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

My profiles: 
Contact me: paulroemer paulroemer paulroemer