The "Layoff As Failure" Mantra

Do me a favor, will you? If you, as a health care leader, feel compelled by dire circumstances to lay people off, stand in front of your mirror before you do the deed and repeat the following mantra 100 times:

"I have failed. My business is performing just as badly as those around me because...I am unable to look for opportunities in a sea of difficulties...I don't understand how to execute a growth strategy....I failed to engage my employees' creative energies in helping us grow...and I failed to hardwire customer loyalty in distinctive ways. And now it's too late. I have failed. And so others must pay the price."

Say it loud, say it proud. 100 times. And then go re-write your vision statement to something closer to the truth, something along the lines of "We're no worse than anybody else."

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Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

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"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...

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