Rants & Musings

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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Patient Relationship Management, add 3 parts technology and stir

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Sometimes you need to break a few eggs to get to the root of the problem. Traditional approaches to improving the patient experience usually begin with the call center. Why is that? Maybe it has something do with the fact that a call center is tangible. Something you can observe and touch. Clearly, it’s something that can be measured. However, I think the real reason is that the number of call centers in any organization is finite. You know your number of call centers. It’s not about five, or as of yesterday morning we had three, it’s a specific number. As such, it’s a reasonable target. It’s a target that can typically be dealt with through the application of technology. There’s a handful of technology, which when applied to any call center in any location will, when measured against the typical metrics, enable the call center to be “better”. If someone’s marching orders are to fix the call center, those orders fit neatly with the application of technology.

Doing something to the call center is a shotgun approach to trying to solve a problem. It’s a recipe that is very repeatable; add three parts technology and stir. It’s almost guaranteed to produce measurable and visible results. It’s also almost guaranteed to not fix a single patient problem. The reason for that is that almost all of the technology deployed in call centers has nothing to do with addressing the reason the patient called. The application of technology for the most part has to do with getting the caller to the CSR more promptly.

The big distinction in dealing with patients versus dealing with call centers is that patient problems usually can’t be resolved via the application of a shotgun solution. Clearly, if every patient that calls about a billing problem is calling about the same billing problem then the application of technology could fix it. However, patients who are calling about billing problems are usually calling regarding a problem that is specific to them. There are two ways to address this type of problem. One way is to get a clear enough understanding of problem on the call and have the patient work with the CSR to resolve the problem. That type of solution puts out the fire. The problem with this type of solution is that it has to be repeated with the CSR every time that same problem arises. The other way, and by far a more proactive way, is to figure out what caused the billing problem and to correct whatever caused the problem thereby preventing it from ever happening again. Instead of putting out the fire, the hospital prevents the fire from reoccurring.

From my perspective this is one of the major differences between Patient Relationship Management (PRM) and Patient Equity Management (PEM). I’m not convinced that PRM actually exists, at least as relates to the acronym. I think it’s either call center management or patient account management, or some combination of the two. If it does in fact somehow manage the relationship of the hospital with the patient, it’s predominantly a one-way relationship, a push relationship from the hospital to the patient. PEM, patient experience management, patient expectation management, patient equity management, requires a two-way relationship, and requires knowing more about the patient than some profile developed through data mining. For PEM to be successful, the hospital must get to the root of why the patients are calling and what can be done to solve the problem in such a manner that the patient no longer has to call. It sounds like a lot of work. It is if you take a shotgun approach to it, sort of like trying to eat the elephant in one bite. I’ve found that if I break it down into manageable pieces, each of those pieces can be designed as a small project that can be solved.

The most difficult thing about trying to implement this type of solution is that it goes against everything that we’ve been doing. This can appear to be so far out of the box that you can’t even see the box. It requires you to think in opposites. The solution begins with how you phrase the problem. Instead of viewing the problem as, “How do we improve our call centers”, we need to be asking, “How do we improve our interactions with our patients?” We’re almost asking the inverse. In mathematics, that’s easy to do; you simply multiply by -1.  Maybe that’s all that’s needed here.

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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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

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The Swarm theory of failure

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According to National Geographic, a single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems. The ability of animal groups—such as this flock of starlings—to shift shape as one, even when they have no leader, reflects the genius of collective behavior—something scientists are now tapping to solve human problems.  Two monumental achievements happened this week; someone from MIT developed a mathematical model that mimics the seemingly random behavior of a flight of starlings, and I reached the halfway point in counting backwards from infinity–the number–infinity/2.

Swarm theory. The wisdom of crowds. Contrast that with the ignorance of many to listen to those crowds. In the eighties it took Coca-Cola many months before they heard what the crowd was saying about New Coke. Where does healthcare EHR fit with all of this? I’ll argue that the authors of the public option felt that wisdom.  If you remember the movie Network, towards the end of the movie the anchorman–in this case it was a man, not an anchor person–besides, in the eighties, nobody felt the need it add he/she or it as some morphed politically correct collection of pronouns.  Whoops, I digress.  Where were we?  Oh yes, the anchor-person.  He/she or it went to the window and exhorted everyone to yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”  Pretty soon, his entire audience had followed his lead.

So, starting today, I begin my search for starlings.  A group whose collective wisdom may be able to help shape the healthcare EHR debate.  The requirements for membership is a willingness to leave the path shaped by so few and trodden by so many, to come to a fork in the road and take it. Fly in a new flock.  A flock that says before we get five years down the road and discover that we have created such an unbelievable mess that not only can we not use it, but that we have to write-off the entire effort and redo it, let us at least evaluate whether a strategic change is warranted.  The mess does not lie at the provider level.  It lies in the belief that hundreds of sets of different standards can be married to hundreds of different applications, and then to hundreds of different Rhios.

Where are the starlings headed?  Great question, as it is not sufficient simply to say, “you’re going the wrong way”.  I will write about some of my ideas on that later today.  Please share yours.

Now, when somebody asks you why you strayed from the pack, it would be good to offer a reasoned response.  It’s important to be able to stay on message.  Reform couldn’t do that and look where it is. Here’s a bullet points you can write on a little card, print, laminate, and keep in your wallet if you are challenged.

  • Different standards
  • Different vendors
  • Different Rhios
  • No EHR Czar

Different Standards + Different Vendors + Different Rhios + No Decider = Failure

You know this, I know this.

To know whether your ready to fly in a new direction, ask yourself this question.  Do you believe that under the present framework you will be able to walk into any ER in the country and know with certainty that they can quickly and accurately retrieve all the medical information they need about you?  If you do, keep drinking the Kool Aid.  If you are a starling, come fly with us and get the word out.  Now return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright and most uncomfortable positions.

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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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

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How the C-suite sees the CIO

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This link is to my latest post for healthsystemCIO.com.  http://healthsystemcio.com/2010/06/10/how-the-c-suite-sees-the-cio/

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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A Perfect Metaphor

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Few things are perfect, and when you find something that is, it is worth examining.  One thing that is perfect is baseball, at least some aspects of it.

Think with me for a minute. 1845.  How much has changed since then?  Just about everything.  Do you know what has not changed—the distance between the bases—90 feet?  This distance may seem insignificant or inconsequential.

In the last 165 years the distance between the bases remained unchanged.  Equipment changed, improved.  The players got bigger, faster, and stronger.  It never dropped to eighty-nine feet; it never jumped to ninety-one feet.

To those who follow baseball, have you noticed how close many of the plays are at first base, or the closeness of the steals of second base?  Can you imagine what would happen to the game of baseball if the distance was shortened to eighty-nine feet?  Almost everyone stealing second base would be safe.  If the distance was ninety-one feet they would all be out.

Somehow, 165 years ago those people got it right, got it absolutely right.  Something as simple as a measurement along a dirt path has stood the test of time.  There are not even any discussions about trying to improve it.

Remember the Titanic?  If one measured all the time spent in its design, and all of the time it sailed before it sank, if you were a betting person you would have bet on the boat.  Reasonable people would have bet on the boat.  You would have been a fool to have bet it would have sunk.

You know what; the Titanic’s sinking was not a fluke. The laws of physics and ship design did not suddenly cease to work.  Do not blame the iceberg.  The Titanic was designed to sink—otherwise it would not have sunk.

What is often misjudged in business is the ill-informed notion that just because something has not collapsed it is not broken.  Hospitals are starting to collapse.  The business model of most of them almost ensures that left unchanged, many, many more will collapse.  They have been designed to collapse.  Just because they have yet to collapse does not mean they won’t, all it means is that they have not—yet.

Few things are perfect.  What discussions there are about the business model are not about improving the model, they are about cutting costs.  What do you have when there are no more costs to cut?  You have a less costly dysfunctional model.

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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Planning an EHR?

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You’ve probably figured out that I am never going to be asked to substitute host any of the home improvement shows.  I wasn’t blessed with a mechanical mind, and I have the attention span bordering on the half-life of a gnat.

I’ve noticed that projects involving me and the house have a way of taking on a life of their own.  It’s not the big projects that get me in over my head—that’s why God invented phones, so we can outsource—it’s the little ones, those fifteen minute jobs meant to be accomplished during half-time, between pizza slices.

Case in point—trim touch ups.  Can, brush, paint can opener tool (screwdriver).  Head to the basement where all the leftover paint is stored.  You know exactly where I mean, yours is probably in the same place.  Directions:  grab the can with the dry white paint stuck to the side, open it, give a quick stir with the screwdriver, apply paint, and affix the lid using the other end of the screwdriver.  Back in the chair before the microwave beeps.

That’s how it should have worked.  It doesn’t, does it?  For some reason, you get extra motivated, figure you’ll go for the bonus points, and take a quick spin around the house, dabbing the trim paint on any damaged surface—window and doorframes, baseboards, stair spindles, and other white “things”.  Those of us who are innovators even go so far as to paint over finger prints, crayon marks, and things which otherwise simply needed a wipe down with 409.

This is when it happens, just as you reach for that slice of pizza.  “What are all of those white spots all over the house?”  She asks—you determine who your she is, or, I can let you borrow mine.  You explain that it looks like that simply because the paint is still wet—good response.  To which she tells you the paint is dry—a better response.

“Why is the other paint shiny, and the spots are flat?”

You pause.  I pause, like when I’m trying to come up with a good bluff in Trivial Pursuit.  She knows the look.  She sees my bluff and raises the ante.  Thirty minutes later the game I’m watching is a distant memory.  I’ve returned from the paint store.  I am moving furniture, placing drop cloths, raising ladders, filling paint trays, all under the supervision of my personal chimera.  My fifteen-minute exercise has resulted in a multi-weekend amercement.

This is what usually happens when the plan isn’t tested or isn’t validated.  My plan was to be done by the end of halftime.  Poor planning often results in a lot of rework.  There’s a saying something along the lines of it takes twice as long to do something over as it does to do it right the first time—the DIRT-FIT rule.  And costs twice as much.  Can you really afford either of those outcomes?  Can you really afford to scrimp on the planning part of EHR?  The exercise of obtaining EHR champions and believers is difficult.  If you don’t come out of the gate correctly, it will be impossible.

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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Strategy Millstones, should that read Milestones?

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If you like adventure, here’s a site to check, http://www.jfk50mile.org/.  This is an annual event whose origin came about during the cold war.  Fortunately for both of us, the entry date has already passed.  The thought behind the JFK fifty-mile hike/run was that because of the possibility of a nuclear attack, each American should be in good enough shape to cover fifty miles in a day.

I participated in the event twice—I wrote participated because to state that I ran the entire way would be misleading— and I can state with certainty that almost no Americans are close to being able to complete this.  The event is run in the fall starting in Boonsboro, Maryland.  It takes place along the Appalachian Trail and the C&O Canal and various other cold, rain soaked, and ice and leaf covered treacherous terrains.

We ran it in our late teens or early twenties, the time in your life when you are indestructible and too dumb to know any better.  One of my most vivid memories of the event was that on the dozen or so miles along the mountain trail, leaves covered the ground.  By default that meant they also covered the rocks along the trail, thus hiding them.  That we were running at elevation—isn’t everyone since you can’t not run at at least some elevation, (that may be the worst sentence every written) but you know what I mean—meant the prior night’s rain resulted in the leaf covered rocks being sheathed in black ice.  That provided a nice diversion, making us look like cows on roller skates—roller blades had yet to catch on outside of California.

There were several places along the trail where the trail seemed to fork—I’m not going to say and I took it—and it wasn’t clearly marked.  Runners could easily take the wrong fork (or should that be Tine?).  I think it would have been helpful had the race organizers installed signs like, “If you are here, you are lost.”  Hold on to that thought, as we may need it later.

Some number of hours after we began we reached the C&O Canal, twenty-six miles of flat terrain along the foot path.  It’s difficult to know how well I was doing in the fifty-mile race, in part because I had never run this distance and because there we no obvious mile markers, at least so I thought.  Then we noticed that about every five and a half to six minutes we would pass a numbered white marbled marker that was embedded along the towpath.  Mile stones.  At the pace we were running, we anticipated we would finish high in the rankings.  As fast as we were running, we were constantly being passed, something that made no sense.  That meant that a number of people were running five minute miles, which we knew they couldn’t do after running through the mountains, or…Or what?

The only thing we knew with any certainty at the end of the day was that the markers with which we used to determine our pace and measure how far we’d run were not mile markers.  We never figured out why they were there or how far apart they were, but we greatly underestimated their distance and hence our progress.

It doesn’t really matter whether you call them mile stones or milestones.  What matters is whether they serve a valid purpose.  If they don’t, milestones become millstones.  Milestones are only useful if they are valid, and if they are met.  Otherwise, they are should’ a, could’ a, would’ as—failure markers, cairns of missed goals and deliverables.

How are your milestones?  Are they valid?  What makes them valid?  Are they yours, or the vendors?  All things to think about as you move forward.

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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