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Eschew Obfuscation

What? Keep it simple, in other words.

Health care providers spend lots of time and money convincing their customers to care about complexity. They fail, usually. Customers don't care about organizational complexity. They refuse to add someone else's problems to their own. And they'll never care about all the ways providers shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, layering complexity upon disorder on top of inward-focused decision-making.

Like big signs everywhere, proclaiming that, in most cases, your physicians are really not YOUR physicians but merely independent contractors needing a place to sit while charting. Signs that say (not so) subtly "...nyah nyah, don't sue us because you won't get anywhere!" Quite a welcome. Thank you, lawyers everywhere.

Or like health care's powerful and omnipresent "guilds" insisting that it be called "pathology" when most customers still look for "the lab." Or "diagnostic imaging" instead of "x-ray." And how is "health information management" different from "information technology" and where the hell do I go for copies of my MEDICAL RECORD?

Busy staff walk right past those signs, thousands of times a day, seeing nothing wrong. Maybe they think the puzzled customers clogging the hallways are really just resting. Some hospitals mask the complexity by adopting an "everybody escorts" philosophy, where employees are expected to physically guide lost customers to their destination. Laudable, but where's the root cause analysis here? Maybe it's not the customers who're lost.

Enough buzzwords, enough title-creep for people and departments, enough trying to explain what's unnecessary and inexplicable. Where's the discernible boost to competitiveness? What's been accomplished except customer confusion and more high-falutin' titles for careerist staff? Where's the recognition that complexity is expensive, confusing and darn unhelpful in any organization's quest for strategic separation?

Stop trying to explain complexity and start getting rid of it.

I'm still waiting for some brave hospital CEO to discover "truth in labelling" and substitute "ANSWERS" for the "reception desk" (a funeral home term if there ever was one...) and "butts and guts" for "gastroenterology." Just kidding on that last one. Maybe.


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