Skip to main content

What If: Quarterly Stakeholder Meetings?

Thanks to the web, organizations have unparalleled access to new ideas and diverse viewpoints. Technology makes it easy to listen, learn and form new connections. And social media, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, et.al., amplify customer voices to the point where anyone - not just the loudest or most important - can be heard.

A good thing? Well, that depends on how interested you are in what your customers have to say.

CEOs of publicly traded companies host annual shareholder meetings and regular conference calls to update anyone interested in the company's performance. Hospital CEOs aren't under the same legal obligation, but nothing prevents them from hosting regular "community meetings" to engage stakeholders in new and insightful ways.

What if...
  • You organized a community relations & outreach blog to invite dialogue and spread your message of community engagement?
  • You scheduled regular meetings, maybe smaller meetings every quarter and a large annual meeting, and used the blog to solicit stakeholder questions?
  • You broadcast those meetings over the web, allowing those watching from afar to participate and submit additional questions?
  • Your marketing team beamed live web and Twitter updates from the meetings, including the questions and answers?
  • You posted meeting summaries as widely as possible - podcasts, YouTube, blogs, etc.?
  • And finally, you posted accountability scorecards as part of the meeting follow-up? Who is accountable? What's the plan and the budget? When are we reporting back?
I'm sure a few hospitals do a version of this. I'd like to hear from them. More typical, I fear, is those hospitals acting on an oldie-but-goodie quote from Jack Welch:
"It's not that bureaucracies dislike customers. They don't. They just don't find them as interesting as they do themselves."



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"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 ...
3 comments
Read more