I
have been very lucky in my career to cross paths with many dedicated and
innovative professionals. In this blog, I would like to introduce you to one
such individual – Dr. Suzanne Paone, MBA, DHA Director, UPMC Information
Services Division. Dr. Paone and I are presenting
a workshop at the 2013 ACHE Congress in March 2013. As we prepared for our
workshop, I got to know Dr. Paone and just knew that she would be an excellent
contributor to DeeMystify. So, I asked her nicely and she wrote for us the
following excellent truths about the current transformation of the health care
industry.
What
follows is Dr. Paone’s Code Red contribution to DeeMystify:
It is clear to me
that we need a few good leaders to handle the truths about health care.
The industry is in a state of imminent transformation. Can you handle the
truth?
What are these truths
and do we really need to worry about this change? According to Harvard
Professor Regina Herzinger 1, consumers are on their way to figuring
out the intricacies of health care just like they figured out complex
phenomenon like driving luxury cars and banking online. Consumers are
engaging – can you handle the truth? Furthermore, technology is making
its way into this archaic morass that we call health care delivery.
Technology is here to save the day and automate our suboptimal processes and
less than stellar customer service- can you handle the truth?
Consumerism meets
technology – we might need to call in the military to clean up after this
mushroom cloud!
Here are a few of the
truths and ways in which one might want to think of surviving these trials and
tribulations. Bootcamp!
1.
The e-Health Consumer is here. Patients expect service and you better
have a Few Good Men and Women to service them. A Contact Center is a good
start, oh and by the way Uncle Sam is forcing you to implement that pesky EMR –
get to it soldier and get the patient portal up and running by 0600!
2.
Teamwork, Teamwork, Teamwork. No more silos soldier – we want to see the
Army, Navy, Airforce and even the Coast Guard all working together and getting
along. Ok, let’s see an integrated team of physicians, IT staff,
operations, legal types and someone with project management skills rallying
those troops.
3.
No more waiting – are we waiting to be annihilated by the enemy?
Consumers want to see their results, chat with providers, schedule online and
order their prescriptions in a secure portal not waiting on the phone – hup to
it soldier!
4.
Engage the physician, they are your secret weapons. Physicians can author
content that patients will relish online, and oh, aye captain, they can get
paid for it too!
5.
Have a military funeral for paternalistic medicine and move on. According to
Pew America, 59% of all adults in the U.S. look online for health information;
a consistent trend seen since 2002. 2 The consumer is engaging, our
teenagers’ generation is our next target – have you seem them online?
Wake up and smell the latrine private – get that EMR installed and stop
doodling with that patient portal.
The truth is that the
old methods of delivering health care are leaving us and the age of the engaged
consumer is here. It is great that Uncle Sam threatens us with Meaningful
Use Stage 2 for goodness sakes, but don’t you want to be ahead of this
campaign? In this new day of e-Health the truth is that you will only
Army Crawl as far as your patient portal and consumer contact center will take
you – oh, and you better be ready to service it all 24x7 soldier, because we
know that this battle never sleeps!
Dr. Paone and I welcome your
responses, comments and any questions you may have and hope you will be joining
us for our workshop at the 2013 ACHE Congress in March 2013. For more
information on the ACHE Congress go to http://www.ache.org/congress/ We are presenting
on Wednesday March 13, 2013 from 8:45 a.m. – Noon CT at the Palmer House Hilton
in Chicago, ILL. Our course, Partnering With Technology Professionals:
Creating a Meaningful, Meaningful Use Strategy, is number 88 found on page 39 of the
digital version of the brochure.
1 Herzlinger, Regina
(1997). Market-driven health care; who wins, who loses in the transformation of
America’s largest service industry. Reading, Mass,: Addison-Wesley Publishing.
No comments:
Post a Comment