Skip to main content

If Disney Took Out Your Trash

If you’re a reasonably long-time reader of Health Care Strategist, you’ve heard me criticize health care's apparent incuriosity about the innovative world beyond some walnut-paneled boardroom.



“Not invented here. Can’t work. Let’s take it to committee. Better yet, let's form a NEW committee!  It’s too risky. Health care is different. You don’t understand - we’re a hospital, not Google! Nobody else is doing it. Why should we?”


Some of you think I’m being too hard on an industry that’s paid my bills for 25+ years. Really? Then tell me why this story is headline-worthy:

"Community Hospital Borrows Show Biz Staging."

Visit any Disney property and what you WON’T see are maintenance carts, food deliveries, trash removals or employees rushing to their job station. All that operational stuff happens behind the scenes, away from the paying public’s eyes.



Lessons from Disney
 Disney pioneered this separation of public and private spaces in the early 1960s at Anaheim’s Disneyland and a decade later on a bigger and better scale at Orlando’s Disney World. By my count that’s 50 years of very public, consumer-focused design. 50 years of lessons to be learned by anybody willing to stop, think, and ask “What if..? Why not..?”


Disney’s thinking has, quite belatedly, diffused throughout health care’s design community. Yet even today it’s sufficiently rare that projects based on this philosophy make headlines.


Ask yourself something: in 50 years, how many times have YOU vacationed in the Magic Kingdom? How many times have your colleagues, your planners and architects visited? Thousands?


And still decades passed before someone in healthcare went “Hey! Wow! What great ideas! Maybe our customers don’t want to see us moving red-bagged trash down a public corridor. And maybe patients on gurneys would rather not be gawked-at on those long elevator rides from 5-East to Radiology and back again.”


Yes, they are great ideas. Ideas that sat there in public view for decades while generations of healthcare execs went merrily along their way.  What are we walking past right now, day after day, without seeing the problem and the opportunity?  And don't answer 'nothing.' 

I think of myself as a hospital leader AND a consumer.  I seldom go anywhere without observing what works (and what doesn't.)  What I love (and what I loathe.)  The details of service and process excellence.  Sometimes that's all innovation requires - those everyday consumer experience, a little reflection, some exploration and lots of empathy. 
  • "I went to Disney World and loved it...but why?" 
  • "I shopped at an Apple store and loved it...but why?" 
  • "I stayed at a Ritz-Carlton and was amazed...but why?" 
(The 'why's' are the most important, by the way.) 

Of course now you can read books about Disney and Steve Jobs and RItz-Carlton, no travel required.  But so can your competitors and wouldn't you rather get there first?

I suppose I should recognize progress instead of criticizing delays. After all, it’s been months since I heard a hospital bragging about the cool flat-screen TVs in their new bed tower. (As if you could buy anything else…)

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

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