Skip to main content

Mayo Clinic Remakes One Town's Health Care

"The first step in the project, Mayo officials say, was to study Austin (MN) and how citizens viewed and used healthcare.


“We wanted to really understand our customers” by using the same strategies companies like Apple Inc. employ to gauge shoppers, said Adam Rees, chief administrative officer at Austin Medical Center. “There are very few medical centers that try to understand how the community defines healthcare.”
And of course understanding how the community defines health care is a useful starting point for improvement.

Learnings thus far include:
  • The number one reason people want to stay healthy is because someone else depends on them.
  • The important role churches could play in social outreach.
  • An impressive array of social service agencies don't communicate well with each other or the public.
(From Thomas Lee and MedCity News.)


Comments

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...

Simplicity From Complexity

Health care planners typically juggle many different services and businesses, each with unique customers, competitors and prospects.  The complexity can be overwhelming.  So-called portfolio models for assessing industry attractiveness and competitive strength can be a good analytical jumping-off point, including the McKinsey-GE 9-box matrix . (Click on the "Launch Interactive" link.)

5 Marketing Megatrends

Coming to a brand near you, from Adam Kleinberg at iMedia Connection, here are " 5 marketing megatrends you can't ignore ." Mass collaboration... Constant connectivity... Globalization... Pervasive distrust in big corporations... A global sense of urgency... #4 is, I think, under-appreciated in health care. Doctors and hospitals like to think of themselves as the last of the white hat-wearing good guys, and maybe they are. But trust is a funny thing - built over decades and lost overnight. Screw it up and watch the laser beam of populist rage move from Wall Street to Medical Avenue.