Today I’m talking with John Lynn, founder of Healthcare Scene as well as two conferences, Expo.Health and HITMC. If I was going to frame out an overarching theme, I would suggest that it is this: Organizational culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Let’s consider the scope of this statement: Ambulatory patients spend about 84 minutes on average in clinic. Of those, 7-12 minutes are with a physician. Inpatient, I imagine, has probably an even greater ratio. So those 7-12 minutes are hypercritical, of course. I would never suggest anything that minimized the doctor-patient relationship. But how many times has a doctor’s patient grade gone down because of someone nasty at the front desk?
All of the other individuals that a patient meets in the non-doctor portion of their visit, all of the moments that happen in that time frame, all of the care coordination that does or does not happen ... all these things have a significant and meaningful impact on not only the patient experience but also patient outcomes.
So, how do you get the front desk and the back office and the middle office and anyone on the phone to recognize the importance to the mission of attaining the quadruple aim of health care? How do you get the janitorial staff to see their role as crucial in the prevention of health care–associated infections (HAIs)? The IT team to feel proud that they have helped with physician burnout by making the tech help doctors instead of slow them down? Or the finance team to consider the financial toxicity of their actions? Or the medical assistants to enter the correct blood pressure or whatever data so our predictive analytics actually work?
The answer to all of these questions points back to strong leadership. It’s building a culture of love, as John Lynn puts it. He means aligning around a mission to do right by patients and give them the best care and outcomes that we can.
Consider this, though: A culture of love can be within one organization, but it can also be cross-organizations. Peers come together and share their experiences and their best practices for the purpose of improving patient care. Then they can take their enthusiasm and passion back to their own organizations. Doing this disperses a culture; it promotes a way of thinking that connects day-to-day drudgery with an endpoint that we all can be proud of.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that establishing a real culture of love is the best way to achieve patient health in health care, a better patient experience, fewer burned out doctors and nurses, as well as other business results. If you’re interested in how all this connects to patient experience, by the way, listen to EP228 with Julie Rish.
John Lynn is the founder of the HealthcareScene.com network, which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 11,000 articles, with John having written over half of the articles himself. These electronic medical record– and health care IT–related articles have been viewed over 18 million times.
John also manages HealthcareITCentral.com and HealthcareITToday.com, the leading career health IT job board and blog. He also organized the first-of-its-kind conference and community focused on marketing to health care: HealthITMarketingConference.com. Plus, he launched Health IT Expo, a conference focused on practical health care IT innovation.
John is an adviser to multiple health care IT companies and a highly sought-after keynote speaker. John is deeply involved in social media and, in addition to his blogs, can be found on Twitter at @techguy and @ehrandhit.
03:16 Why putting the burden of patient experience solely on the physician is problematic.
04:10 The biggest influencer of satisfaction in an acute care setting: nurses.
05:05 On the ambulatory side, the biggest point of satisfaction is the front desk worker.
05:22 “We need to look well beyond the doctor if we want to really create a great patient experience.”
05:27 Interview on Don Lee’s HCBiz podcast series on the importance of the janitorial staff.
06:18 How tech can help solve the communication gap between the staff in a health care setting.
06:51 HITMC Conference keynote speaker, Dan Heath, author of five New York Times bestsellers, including The Power of Moments.
07:53 Creating “peak moments” in the patient experience.
08:26 “I wonder if trying to solve all the problems of patients’ [experience] isn’t the wrong strategy.”
08:53 Are organizations actually asking how they can improve the patient experience?
09:22 How administrative overhead is keeping organizations and physicians from focusing on improving the patient experience.
10:38 The trend across organizations that improves patient experience is leadership.
11:35 How the last touchpoint has a significant impact on the patient experience.
12:05 How does an organization communicate an understanding of the importance of the whole staff team?
13:23 The services organizations need to provide in order to guarantee patient payment.
14:07 The short-term and long-term benefits of focusing on the patient experience.
14:55 Understanding the cost associated with the care and aligning the price of things with the cost. University of Utah as an example of attempting to do this.
16:44 “The consumers aren’t going to wait.”
16:50 Convenience vs quality, and how this is going to affect health care.
17:29 Creating a culture of love.
17:40 How Expo.Health is not so much a conference as a community with a passion for using technology to improve health care.
17:51 How bringing together every side of health care professionals to share their ideas and successes is the real answer to improving the patient experience.
18:56 “How do we get those innovations shared?”
19:02 The keynote speakers at the upcoming Expo.Health: Ivo Nelson and Dana Sellers.
21:39 “How much are you infusing the mission of your organization to improve patient care?”
22:36 “If you can’t create a mission in health care, then you probably shouldn’t work in health care.”
26:29 How Expo.Health is affecting change and transformation.
27:08 Providing practical innovations to improve patient care.
29:40 Expo.Health this year is July 31–August 2 in Boston at the Renaissance Boston.