PRM

Patient Experience Management–what is it?

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If you watch too much television your brain will fry. Sometimes I feel like mine is in a crepe pan that was left sitting on the stove too long. Two nights ago I’m watching Nova or some comparable show on PBS. The topic of the show was to outline all the events that took place that helped Einstein discover that the energy of an object is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, better known as E=mc². It was presented to the audience at a level that might best be described as physics for librarians, which was exactly the level at which I needed to hear it. It’s physics at a level that is suitable for conversation at Starbucks or any blog such as this.

So here’s what I think I understood from the show. It tracked the developments of math and physics in 100 years prior to Einstein’s discovery. The dénouement appeared to occur when Einstein and his fiancée were riding in the bow of the small boat. Apparently, he was leaning over the side of the boat and noticed that the waves generated by the front of the boat moved at the same speed as the boat. He then noted that fact only held true for those persons in the boat, who were in fact, traveling at the same rate of speed. However for those persons watching from the shore, that same wave was not only moving slower than the boat it got further behind over time. Some other things occurred, yada, yada, yada, and there you have it. Clearly, the details are in the yada, yadas.

So here’s what happens when you watch too much television. As I’m running this morning somehow my mind takes pieces from that show and staples them together to yield the following. Let’s go back to the equation E=mc². For purposes of this discussion I’ll redefine the variables, so that:
E = the percentage of Patient Complaints/Inquiries.
m = Patient in-bound calls.
c = number of Patients
If this were true–this is an illustration, not an axiom–the percentage of complaints in the call centers of an healthcare provider is equal to the number of in-bound calls times the square of the number of patients. So as the number of calls increases the number of complaints/questions increases and as the number of patients increases the number of complaints increases exponentially. Of course this is made up, but there appears to be a grain of truth to it. As a number of calls increase the percentage of complaints is likely to increase, and as the number of patients increases there will probably be an even greater increase in the percentage of complaints incurred. I think we can agree that a reasonable goal for a healthcare provider is to decrease the percentage of complaints and perhaps to shift a hefty percentage of inquiries to some form of internet self-service vehicle.

I think sometimes the way providers like to assess the issue of Patient Experience Management  (PEM) is by looking at how much money providers throw at the problem. I think some people think that if one provider has 2 call centers, and another provider has 3 call centers, that the provider with 3 must be more interested in taking care of the their patients, and might even be better at PEM.  I don’t support that belief. I think it can be demonstrated that the provider with the most call centers, and most Patient Service Representatives, and the most toys deployed probably has the most problems with their patients. I don’t think it’s a chicken and egg argument. If expenditures increase year after year, and resources are deployed continuously to solve the same types of problems, I think it’s a sign that the provider and its patients are growing more and more dysfunctional.

How does this tie to Einstein and his boat? Perhaps the Einsteins are those who work with the provider; those who are moving at the same speed, those in lockstep. From their vantage point, the waves and the boat, like the provider and its patients, are all moving forward at the same speed. Perhaps only the people standing along the shore are able to see what is actually occurring; the waves distance themselves from the boat in much the same way that the patients distance themselves from the provider.

PEM is such an easy way to see large improvements accrue to the provider, especially using social media.

Patient Experience Management (PEM): Left Brainers, Right Brainers, and No Brainers

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Sometimes I feel a little like the ambassador from the planet Common Sense, and unfortunately very few of us speak the same language. Let’s see if we can segment the Patient Experience Management (PEM) population into left brainers, and right brainers. I am wrestling with an issue that I believe is a no-brainer.

One point, upon which both sides seem to agree, is that without the patients, PEM would be superfluous. The breakdown is that for a hospital to flourish in the long term, hospitals should re-engineer their business processes to facilitate the dissolution or substantive reduction of traditional customer service.  This extends beyond the cordial relationship of a nurse or a doctor and their patients in hospital beds.

In many, if not most instances, the very existence of traditional customer service provides a vehicle which acts as an enabler for failure. It gives hospitals permission to be mediocre in dealing with their interactions with their patients and physicians. In effect, traditional customer service is a tacit admission to the employees and the patients, “We don’t always get it right. We don’t always do our best.

Before deciding not to read further, ask yourself a few questions. The purpose of the questions is to try and articulate a quantifiable business goal for customer service, PEM.

1. Does customer service have planned revenue targets
2. Does it have its own P&L?
3. Does it have a measurable ROI?
4. What is the loaded cost for each patient and doctor interaction?
5. Could the costs of those interactions be eliminated by fixing something in operations?

If the answers to 1-3 are no, the answer to 4 is unknown, and the answer to 5 is yes, your hospital inadvertently made the decision to ignore revenues and to incur expenses that provide no value to your organization. I believe this premise can be proved easily.

The careers of many people are directly tied to the need to have customer service and call centers. Big is good. Bigger is better. Software, hardware, telecommunications, networks—more is better. Calls are the lifeblood of every call center. Without those calls, the call center dies. Calls are good, more calls are better.

When was the last time you were in a meeting when someone said something like, “In the last three years our patient call volume has continued to increase,” or, “Calls have gone up by forty percent.” That part may sound familiar. The phrase nobody has heard is, “We can’t continue to add that many calls.” Tenure and capital. That part of the business is managed with the expectation that the number of calls will continue to grow. And guess what? It does. How prophetic is that? Or is it pathetic? You decide.

Given that, how does the typical healthcare provider manage their customer service investment? Play with the numbers. In many organizations, if customer service management can show that patient satisfaction is holding steady, no matter how bad it is, and they can use the numbers to show that some indicator has moved in a favorable direction, other areas of the business are led to believe that customer service is performing well.

Memo to those executives who are authorizing customer service expenditures—I want to make sure there is no mistaking how I view the issue. If that is what you are hearing from your customer service managers, they either don’t understand their responsibility, or they understand it and they don’t want you to understand it.

To be generous, if patient satisfaction with regard to customer service is below ninety-five percent, your customer service is in serious need of a re-think. Just because patient satisfaction is not tanking faster does not mean customer service is functional.

Most executives know how to get numbers to paint whatever picture they need to paint. Beware the sleight of hand. Any time the customer service manager comes to you and says he is improving operations by reducing the average amount of time someone spends on the phone talking to a patient (average handle time), don’t believe anything else he tells you. Allow me to translate. When the customer service budget is tight (too many interactions and too few people with which to interact) the way to make it fit the budget is to make your people end the call quicker. Shorter calls mean more calls per hour. Note—speed buys you nothing, except for more repeat calls, less resolution, less patient satisfaction. It’s a measure of speed—IT IS NOT A MEASURE OF ACCOMPLISHMNET.

I’d be willing to bet that somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent of calls from your patients and physicians can be addressed better via a combination of social media and the Internet.

Patient Relationship Mangement–who’s kidding who

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(AP) New York. CNN reported that Patient Relationship Management (PRM) and Patient Experience Management (PEM) died. Services will be held next Monday at Dunkin Donuts. Patients are asked not to attend, but instead to forward their complaints to Rosie O’Donnell.

PRM is what hospitals tend to use; it measures against their standards.  It is a push model.  PEM is what patients tend to use; it is a pull model.

A fellow, David Phillips, wrote, “Relationships should be considered part of the intrinsic value of the corporation”—he is an auditor. A group of PhDs who concluded that the six components for measuring relationships include; mutuality, trust, commitment, satisfaction, exchange relationship, and communal relationship. I feel better just knowing that.

Patient Relationship Management—PRM. I hate being the one to break the news but, PRM is dead. I didn’t kill it. It’s dead because it never existed.  Relationship Management.  Who is actually measuring a relationship?  What unit of measure do you use to measure a relationship? Inches, foot-pounds, torque?  PRM carcasses are strewn about. You can’t manage what you can’t or don’t measure.

“What are you talking about?” She hollered. “We measure. We measure everything. If it’s got an acronym, we’ve got a measure for it. KPIs. CSFs. ACD. IVR. ATT. AHT. Hold time. Abandonments. Churn.”

Just because something is being measured, it doesn’t mean that the measure has anything to do with the desired outcome. Nobody has a single quantifiable metric that precisely points to the health of an individual patient relationship. Seems silly? No sillier than really believing you have an ability to manage something as ephemeral and esoteric as relationships.

Just how good are those relationships everyone thinks they’ve been managing? Five percent higher than last month?  Down three percent over plan?  Permit me a brief awkward segue. Joseph Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths are a statistic.” The point is that scale matters—a great deal.  One death versus a million.  One patient interaction versus millions.  It makes a difference. The things we do that impact patient experiences impact patients individually, one patient at a time.

PRM metrics in use at hospitals apply to patients—plural.  PRM metrics are benchmarks and averages—patients aren’t.  Hospitals measure against the masses, against the pool of patients.  The patient mass does not churn, does not leave your hospital, does not ask to speak to a supervisor.  Consider a patient, not a single metric.  Not a single measure in your hospital accurately depicts the success or failure of that patient’s experience.

So, what’s a hospital to do? Stop trying to manage your hospital’s performance by managing relationships.  Here’s what you can do, manage your hospital using things you can measure. Once you can measure it you can manage it.  A hospital can start by defining metrics for the following;

Patient Referral Management—how many patients came via referral?

Patient Resolution Management—how many patient problems were fixed?

Patient Recovery Management—how many patients did you win back?

Patient Retention Management—how many patients did you prevent from going elsewhere?

If you are the CIO, show the VP of Operations your ideas for tracking the answers to these questions. This is step one to having a real PEM program.  If you are really serious about having a patient experience management program, change the word “experience” to the word “equity.”  Patient Equity Management—all of a sudden you have something worth talking about.

 

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 one day, if we stay the course, this will all get better.  These are those who believe 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 and afterward felt the need to interact with your provider. If you’re totally honest, the forthcoming interaction should quicken your pulse. Cold beads of sweat appear on your forehead, your palms feel a little clammy, and you feel an unexplained need to microwave your neighbor’s cat.

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 phone call.

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.

Patients Experience Management versus Patient Experience Management.  See that little ‘s’ tacked on to the word patient?  One letter makes a world of difference.  Patients do experience the decisions of your hospital’s management, and oftentimes that experience is unpleasant.  That experience can involve a broad range of issues–billing, insurance, dispute management, scheduling, prescriptions.

I think with most patient interactions the patients believe that the person on the other end of the line (think hospital customer service person) 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.

With whom do you do business? 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 so many patients feel the same way? That said, could it be rather naïve to believe your hospital’s current approach to patient relationship management will make any difference?

Revising patient interactions via social media and CRM

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For those who don’t have time for 140 characters, or who don’t have much to say, I’ve created an alternative, smidge.com. The Urban Dictionary defines a smidge as a small amount of something, short for smidegeon.

This will revolutionize the interaction between patient/customers and the healthcare provider. We all know how annoying customers can be. Why should providers continue to enable bad behavior? They call, fax, email, and tweet. Enough already.

It’s time providers show a little backbone, show the customers who’s in charge.

Here’s how smidge.com works. Each time a customer interacts with you, give the patient their smidegeon account. Explain to them that this is their private way to communicate with you. It’s instantaneous, totally secure, and it operates 7 x 24 x 365. No more navigating IVRs, no more being placed on hold, no longer will they be transferred to another agent, never again will they be monitored for quality control purposes. Let the customers know that anytime they want to smidge, the world is theirs.

Explain to them that you are doing away with archaic forms of interacting; closing your call centers, throwing away your fax machines, and deleting your presence on the web. What are the advantages to your firm? They’re almost too many to document. Think of the capital savings. No more IT expenditures to support those millions of whining customers. No more CSRs complaining about not being allowed to browse the web, or about not getting their mid-morning break.

And now for the best part. In order to minimize bandwidth and storage costs, each smidegeon only allows the user to use each letter of the alphabet one time, meaning the largest smidge can’t exceed 26 characters. The longest message one could get is, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.  That being the case, there will no longer be any justification for the customer complaining that your company didn’t resolve their problem.The roles will be reversed. The upper hand will now go to the company.

How? Let’s look at an example. The patient wants to smidge the following change of address information, “We are moving on October 13 to 1175 Harmony Hill Road, Spokane, Washington. Please forward our bill.” Since smidges don’t allow numbers, we’ve already simplified the message, and the ease of entry. Now, if we translate the message into a correctly formatted smidegeon, we get the following message, “We ar moving ctb Hny l d Spk f u b d.” Now, how can you be expected to understand that kind of nonsense? If you can’t understand it, how can your patients possibly blame you

Patient Relationship Management (PRM)

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If you watch too much television your brain will fry. Sometimes I feel like mine is in a crepe pan that was left sitting on the stove too long. Two nights ago I’m watching Nova or some comparable show on PBS. The topic of the show was to outline all the events that took place that helped Einstein discover that the energy of an object is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, better known as E=mc². It was presented to the audience at a level that might best be described as physics for librarians, which was exactly the level at which I needed to hear it. It’s physics at a level that is suitable for conversation at Starbucks or any blog such as this.

So here’s what I think I understood from the show. It tracked the developments of math and physics in 100 years prior to Einstein’s discovery. The dénouement appeared to occur when Einstein and his fiancée were riding in the bow of the small boat. Apparently, he was leaning over the side of the boat and noticed that the waves generated by the front of the boat moved at the same speed as the boat. He then noted that fact only held true for those persons in the boat, who were in fact, traveling at the same rate of speed. However for those persons watching from the shore, that same wave was not only moving slower than the boat it got further behind over time. Some other things occurred, yada, yada, yada, and there you have it. Clearly, the details are in the yada, yadas.

So here’s what happens when you watch too much television. As I’m running this morning somehow my mind takes pieces from that show and staples them together to yield the following. Let’s go back to the equation E=mc². For purposes of this discussion I’ll redefine the variables, so that:
E = the percentage of Patient Complaints/Inquiries.
m = Patient in-bound calls.
c = number of Patients
If this were true–this is an illustration, not an axiom–the percentage of complaints in the call centers of an healthcare provider is equal to the number of in-bound calls times the square of the number of patients. So as the number of calls increases the number of complaints/questions increases and as the number of patients increases the number of complaints increases exponentially. Of course this is made up, but there appears to be a grain of truth to it. As a number of calls increase the percentage of complaints is likely to increase, and as the number of patients increases there will probably be an even greater increase in the percentage of complaints incurred. I think we can agree that a reasonable goal for a healthcare provider is to decrease the percentage of complaints and perhaps to shift a hefty percentage of inquiries to some form of internet self-service vehicle.

I think sometimes the way providers like to assess the issue of Patient Relationship Management  (PRM) is by looking at how much money providers throw at the problem. I think some people think that if one provider has 2 call centers, and another provider has 3 call centers, that the provider with 3 must be more interested in taking care of the their patients, and might even be better at PRM.  I don’t support that belief. I think it can be demonstrated that the provider with the most call centers, and most Patient Service Representatives, and the most toys deployed probably has the most problems with their patients. I don’t think it’s a chicken and egg argument. If expenditures increase year after year, and resources are deployed continuously to solve the same types of problems, I think it’s a sign that the provider and its patients are growing more and more dysfunctional.

How does this tie to Einstein and his boat? Perhaps the Einsteins are those who work with the provider; those who are moving at the same speed, those in lockstep. From their vantage point, the waves and the boat, like the provider and its patients, are all moving forward at the same speed. Perhaps only the people standing along the shore are able to see what is actually occurring; the waves distance themselves from the boat in much the same way that the patients distance themselves from the provider.

PRM is such an easy way to see large improvements accrue to the provider, especially using social media.

We made it to the bigs

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Somehow, my social media article healthsystemcio.com made the top story of Chime Healthcare CIO SmartBrief.  http://ow.ly/2snrU

Not bad for a metaphorical tomato thrower.

Thanks for playing along.

When Patient Relationship Management Fails-call the cable guy

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(This missive is somewhat long—this is where my mind goes when I run.)

Ever watch the show “This old House”? Something magical happens to a man when he watches somebody single-handedly rebuild a 6,000 year old home in a 30 minute program. After that no task seems too complex. As a normal male the first rule of thumb is to remember that having a master’s degree from a reputable university qualifies you for about anything short of brain surgery. The true Type A will often carry that step further by reminding himself that given another week or two of study that even brain surgery would not be that difficult.

I did a project in one of my prior homes. It involved the simple task of rearranging bedroom furniture one Sunday afternoon; 15 minute project, total cost—nothing. After all, how difficult could that be? The truth is the actual moving of furniture involved nothing more than I’d planned. Only when I thought I was done did I notice that the television set was now located a good 20 feet away from the cable television outlet. The obvious solution would be to simply move the furniture back to its original position.

Can’t do that. To move the furniture back to the original position is either admitting defeat, or that I wasn’t bright enough to realize that the cable outlet and the television would be on opposite ends of the planet by the time I finished. Besides, my wife had already seen the new arrangement and if I moved it back to its original position I would have to explain why.

So when she enters the room and asks why (and she will ask why—that’s her job) there is now a 25 foot piece of black coaxial cable snaking its way diagonally across her bedroom carpeting I had better be prepared to answer. Sometimes if you’re quick, real quick, you can try and bluff your way around the problem with a technical answer. You can try and explain that all of the static electricity that was created by sliding furniture across the carpet has caused the sonic membrane surrounding the fiber optical transponders in the coax to be 6 ohms off the medium allowable temperature variation for the building codes in your neighborhood. It is called stalling, allowing for a brief period of self-correction.

The truth, having failed me, the only other option left was to try something close to the truth. I’m forced to say I knew the cable would be at opposite ends of the room before I moved the furniture. My plan all along was to call the cable company and ask them to come to the house to install another outlet on the correct wall.

It’s my wife’s job to inquire how much it will cost—she did not fail me.  This is a clear case of me answering her question without bothering to think. It is important to have a clear understanding of the underlying issues before trying to resolve the problem. I mentioned it should cost forty dollars, and we will only need to leave the cable strewn across her bedroom floor for a few days. It’s then her job to say if we put the furniture back where it was we can solve both problems in twenty minutes. Besides, the cable technician left a mess the last time they did some work, and she wasn’t going to spend more money for poor service. Stay with me here, this is how it becomes her fault, and how it relates to the topic of Patient Relationship Management (PRM).

Once her issues were out in the open was a simple matter to devise a solution to address them.  The solution needed to be implemented quickly and it needed to be free. My answer came quickly—too quickly. Eighty percent of the problem could be handled by simply running the cable along the floor board, and then under the bed. That only left five feet of cable between me and a happy marriage. Unfortunately, the five feet in question is from the foot of the bed to the television and runs across the major walkway of the room, looking all the while like an undernourished blacksnake.  Did I mention she hates snakes?

Undaunted, I asked for a little assistance to move the bed. This accomplished, I headed for the garage to find exactly the proper tools for the proper job. I returned five minutes later, tools in hand. I was surprised to see the look of dismay on her face. As it turns out, her dismay resulted from the razor blade knife clutched in my hand. After twenty minutes of the best Boolean logic I could muster, I convinced her, or at least myself, that it would be a simple matter to cut a small hole in the carpet and force the cable underneath. After all, the bed would hide the hole.

The only other tool I thought I would require was a roll of duct tape and a 4’11” broom handle.  Women know we are confused about how to proceed the moment they see men rely on the duct tape gene. Most men, when cornered believe enough duct tape, properly applied, can serve as a panacea for anything up to and including world hunger.

You’ll note I specified the exact length of the broom handle. It’s only after having attempted the project that I’m able to relate the length of the handle. Most men on a project, especially those being watched by their wife, wouldn’t bother to measure a length any more than they would ask directions while driving across Borneo with half a tank of gas.

As it turns out, I should’ve measured both the distance the cable had to travel under the carpet and the length of the broom handle prior to taping the cable to the handle and shoving a 4’11” broom handle under a five-foot expanse of wall-to-wall carpet. The fact the carpeting was wall-to-wall is key to understanding what lay ahead. Let’s make certain the situation is spelled out clearly; the new carpet in our new home had a hole in it, a broom handle was now nicely buried under the carpet, and my wife was perched on top of the bed like one of Macbeth’s three witches waiting to see what I would do next.

Walking to the wall and grasping the carpet as best I could, I pulled up a good 10 feet of it from the tacking, acting all the while like I would have to have done that even had the handle not been one inch too short. Leaning with my one arm on the newly exposed carpet tacks, I solicited help in excising the handle from beneath the rug. That accomplished, and dying the death of a thousand cuts, I looked for another proper tool to complete the task. Walking through the kitchen to the garage I spent a moment wondering if the proper tool could be found in the kitchen. Naturally, it was—one half of a pair of chopsticks or, as it’s now referred to in technical terms, a broom handle extender.

Five minutes later, the broom handle extender and cable was firmly duct taped to the broom handle and once again shoved under the carpet. They both went in, but no cable came out the other side. So, I pulled the handle back out and surveyed the situation. The situation, as it turns out, was that in my hand was a perfectly good broom handle, a piece of coaxial cable, and no broom handle extender. The extender was now smack dab in the middle of the 5 foot expanse I was trying to cross, the problem being it was on the wrong side of the carpet, the underneath side. It was positioned perfectly. It was too far under to be reached from either end. In other words, the chop stick just became a permanent fixture in our bedroom.

Certainly, one small chopstick hidden beneath four hundred square feet of carpeting was not a big problem to me. It was not a problem unless you happen to be walking barefoot across the carpet and you happen not to be the one who put it there.  It became not unlike the fable The Princes and the Pea, and my princes found it immediately. In the fable, it was the princes could not sleep. In my case, I knew the non-sleeper in the story would be me for as long as the chopstick remained under the carpet.  Keeping my eyes focused firmly on the task at hand, I foolishly believed if I could resolve the cable problem, the matter of the chopstick would resolve itself.

One final trip to the garage led me to return with a second broom handle. The peanut gallery looked on in disbelief in my ability to finish what I had started without having to sell the house at a loss before I was through. The “I told you so’s” were being thought through in most of the major dialects of the Western Hemisphere.

This had ceased to be a project—it was now a quest, no lesser than that of the Holy Grail. A mile of duct tape later, both broom handles were firmly attached to one another. Even if I destroyed every square foot of carpeting in the house, I would not lose this broom handle under the carpet.  A minute later the cable emerged exactly where it should have, on the other side of the room.  I pulled the out broom handle, attached the cable and turned on the television. Everything worked, just as I had known it would.

Standing in front of the television, admiring my work in the new room arrangement, I noticed I was now a good foot taller than when I began the project. Was this an illusion brought about by my success?  As was quickly pointed out by my princess, the stature was more attributable to the fact that all of the carpet padding that used to lie between the end of the bed and the wall was now nicely compacted into a ball.  The ball of padding was located in the same twilight zone the chopstick found, right in the middle of the walkway. Trying to correct the problem only made it worse. Each time I prodded the ball of padding with the broom handle it grew larger underfoot. Within minutes it looked as though I had managed to suck up every inch of padding from every room in the house and placed it between my wife and a good night’s sleep. Resorting to logic once again, I quickly pointed out that she should walk on it because she would no longer be bothered by feeling the chopstick underfoot.

The next day I was on the phone scheduling an appointment with the carpet installation service. The carpet installer had to pull up most of the carpeting in the bedroom to be able to reach what she had affectionately labeled Chopstick Hill. I watched him work and I learned all about carpet padding and the installation of hardwood floors. He explained it was lucky for me that he came over because our padding was not good quality padding and we would not have known that had he not pulled up the carpet. I asked him why, if we would not have known about the padding, we would want to spend $300 for new padding. Without responding, he just kept slamming his knee in the carpet installer, charging one hundred dollars for his efforts and my education.

I was so impressed with his discussion of hardwood floors I almost bought one on the spot to surprise my wife. By now, we both know she wouldn’t have appreciated the surprise. Anybody who did not want to spend forty dollars on the cable repairman would probably have a little more trouble accepting five thousand dollars for a new floor.

However, I walked around with a silent smirk on my face for days knowing had we done it my way from the start, call the cable man, we could’ve saved the hundred dollars and never put a hole in the carpet.

This is what can happen when your patients decide to bypass your customer service because of prior bad experiences they have had trying to solve a problem.  It usually comes down to process, bad process.  Processes are a lot easier to fix than disappointed patients.

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

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Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

Patient Relationship Management (PRM)

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Have I mentioned I am an unapologetically type A person, for the most part an off the chart Meyers Briggs INTJ? This morning I awoke feeling no more querulous than usual—that would change rather abruptly. In general, I make it a rule never to learn anything before having my first cup of coffee. Unfortunately, today wasn’t going to be one of those days. In fact, my mood was a direct result of the instrument pictured above.

These days I am using that to make my coffee as my normal espresso maker’s LED screen is displaying a message telling me my grinder is blocked—sounds a little like something two tablespoons of Pepto should be able to fix, doesn’t it? Google was not help—three hits, each instructing me to send it back to the dealer for a $350 repair. Sounds more like a response you’d get regarding a car, not a coffee maker.

I brought this pot home from my work in Madrid. It works using the same principles as a pressure cooker. Water is placed in the bottom; an espresso grind goes above the water.Steam is forced through the grind, past a metal sieve, and into the container where as it cools it is reconstituted as a liquid—coffee. Anyway, as my coffee is cooking, I notice the metal sieve sitting on the counter. It seemed like too much work to turn it off, rinse the pot, regrind the coffee, and wait the additional five minutes. I was too tired for a do-over.

Too bad for me. Now, I’m not sure if what happened next would be found under the topic of fluid mechanics, converting steam into thermal energy, or general explosives, but it would have made for an entertaining physics experiment. In what appeared to play out in slow motion like the Challenger explosion actually occurred in a fraction of a second. It seems that metal sieve does more than strain the grinds from the steam. It also prevents a thermonuclear reaction. Apparently when the pressure passes the fail-safe point, the reaction proceeds to the next logical step. That step, which I observed, involves coffee and grinds exiting the pot so rapidly that before I could blink they covered the walls, counters, and floors as far away as ten feet. (It was actually pretty impressive to watch.) I’ve been informed that once I finish writing I will be attending to the mess.

The scene reminded me of one of the forensic shows on cable. I halfway expected the medical examiner Henry Lee to walk through my door to examine the splatter pattern.

The choice I faced was to do it over, or deal with the consequences. I was in a hurry, consequences be damned—it turns out that it wasn’t the consequences that would be damned. My guess is that I’m looking at at least thirty minutes of cleanup work.

It pays to invest the time to do something right the first time. Sort of like dealing with patients. Let’s say a certain patient call takes nine minutes to handle correctly. As many of you have observed, there are two ways to go about this. You can do it over a period of several four minute calls because your people don’t want to get dinged for exceeding their handle time allotment, or you can allow the people to talk until the patient’s need is solved.

As patients, we know you prefer the first approach. The mere fact that patients have to listen to a recording telling us how important our call is makes us leery. I think everyone who is monitoring calls and call metrics needs to come over to my house for a cup of coffee and let the people do their jobs.

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