Skip to main content

Making clarity, transparency and simplicity a national priority.

Keep things simple urges branding expert Alan Siegel in this TED talk.

Says Siegel, "It's incumbent on us to make clarity, transparency and empathy a national priority." A national priority, or a competitive advantage for those few organizations willing to challenge the old ways of thinking and communicating.

Instead of waiting for simplicity-mandating legislation to be passed (a bill that's certain to exceed 1,000 pages...) why not move aggressively to turn your hospital into one known as the EASIEST to do business with? Might that resonate with at least a few key market segments?

What if you redesigned all your forms to be clearer, simpler, shorter and more understandable? What if you issued a "No fine print" edict?

Are your bills incomprehensible because you prefer it that way? Because your competitors' bills are just as bad and you're comfortable being no worse than anybody else? Or is there an opportunity here to educate, connect and inform? Do you find any value in "educating, connecting and informing?" (If not, I'm pretty sure you're reading the wrong blog.)

Are your lawyers and revenue cycle consultants driving your customer communication?

What if your Forms Committee was challenged to think differently, to help build your organization's competitive advantage instead of being known as "The Committee Where Other Committees Go To Die."

Why not cleanse your customer-facing processes of steps that can't be justified beyond "Well, it's just our policy."

Watch the video...





Comments

glofthouse52 said…
I believe this tenet in my practice of medicine. I believe that this concept is WHY I have loyal patients.
I commend this to ALL those who render service as a business, and actively seek those who perform in this fashion. Kudos, Steve!!
Jerry

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

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

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