5 ways hospitals can cope with the pain of change

by Andrea J. Simon Some healthcare organizations are struggling with change. They never anticipated the speed with which the transition from volume to value would become a crisis, with declining inpatient admissions occurring much faster than expected. As anthropologists, we work with organizations that need to change. We know that the brain hates change. Added to that, people are driven by the power of habits. We realize the demands on our time and energies have changed and doing the same old thing is, in a very Darwinian sense, mal-adaptive. You don't want to find you and your institution extinct, do you? As the research clearly shows, few people are taught how to innovate or respond to changing times with appropriate solutions. Most people are looking to mimic best practices from others who have experimented before them. If you are going to change you need to focus on creating a shared vision and developing the necessary skills, on the social network and of the individual performer--a lot of things all at once. In today's fast changing healthcare environment, that is just not happening. You are now going to have to create your own best practices and hope that they work before your competitor mimics them and out-competes you for the same customers or services or patients. To make this simple and easy, hospital leaders should pretend they are in a theatrical production and have been for many years. They have been playing, for example, "Macbeth" (think healthcare) fo...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs