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

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare
Post a Comment
Read more

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved
Post a Comment
Read more