Customer Focus

I don't think I have ever heard the work "customer" uttered at a hospital, in my classes at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, or in any publication. Many of the problems that health care industry finds itself in can be attributed to a lack of consumer focus.

A hospital administrator must start reading publications that help them to have a customer focus. Some of the good ones include:

The Church of the Customer Blog
Seth Godin's Blog

The customer focus world is coming. Medicare has begun to get involved and it's only a matter of time before someone finds a way of disseminating this information to the public.

Examples of Quality Through Strategy

There are three great examples of hospitals and clinics that have differentiated themselves on the quality of their services.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Cleveland Clinic
The Mayo Clinic

If you read the mission statements of each of these hospitals, the common theme of all of them is patient care comes first. By focusing on the quality of the patient experience, these hospitals will never have to worry about having patients in their hospital. Patients will seek them out and the bottom line of the institution will be better for it.

Quality and Leadership

As we explore the concept of quality at your hospitals we will further dissect the role of leadership in improving quality.

In order to instill quality at our hospitals there are four ways of thinking that we must change to.

1. Quality is not a mistake, it can be measured and it can be managed - In medicine, many people say that outcomes are too unpredictable and therefore there is no way that one can manage and improve it. This is not a mentality of quality leadership. While there may not be a way of measuring something presently, a quality organization will find a to start measuring something and continually tweak it until it is a good measurement.

2. We ultimately serve our patients - Hospitals get very confused as to who their customers are as a business. Are the customers the physicians, the patients, or the community? The patients are the reason for a hospital to be. Improve the quality by focusing on the patient experience and the physicians and community will fall in line.

3. Go long - In order to improve quality in your organization, you have to take a long term approach. If quality is thought in a short term, it will not be accepted by your stakeholders. Changes in quality are expensive and inconvient. Thinking long term puts this in perspective.

4. Tap your inner creativity - Health care workers are not especially known for their creativity, but they may be the most creative and abstract thinkers in the world. Use that creativity to try solutions that you may not think will work. Give your employees the ability to try things and fail. Failure and learning from the failure is what give the world some of its greatest innovations.

Walter Reed Is Just the Beginning

One seismic shift in the layers of the Earth is the impetus of a tidal wave. That seismic shift has occured at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

"This is going to be comprehensive; it's going to be vigorous," said Donna Shalala, who is in charge of investigating the care at Walter Reed. The American public is outraged at the conditions soldiers arriving back from Iraq and Afghanistan face in their hospital care. The public holds hospitals to a high standard in quality of their work. However, Walter Reed is having issues with taking care of the families of the poor patients, upkeep of the facility, cutting through bureaucracy to treat patients in a timely and sufficient manner.

They say that hundreds of miles out into the ocean one can't even see a tidal wave forming. The outrage on display now is nothing compared to the outrage to follow. If the Washington Post were to go to any hospital in the United States, what would they find? Would they find the perfectly managed facility that they expect? Hospitals need to prepare themselves to address issues in their facility that they would not want on the front page of their local newspaper.

The tidal wave is just on the horizon, better batten down the hatches.