What's the story? Branding Hurley Medical Center
by Andrea J. Simon
I have had several requests to share my experiences as interim senior vice president of branding, marketing, physician services at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Mich., from 2008-2009, and again from 2010-2012. To help you in your own efforts to brand, market and build your organization, I've segmented the story into four blog posts, each with a specific focus.
This post explains how you find the key essence of an institution and turn it into a real advantage--that brand story that answers the question "Why You." The next two posts focus on online experiences to build the brand story in an inbound ma...
Source: hospital impact - March 26, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
13 important lessons for every leader
by Darlene A. Cunha
What does it take to create a great leader who can survive the neck break pace of healthcare reform? Astute leaders surround themselves with excellence, a team that strives to carry out the mission and vision of the organization, while analyzing ways to continually improve.
But what intangibles make a great leader? While there are hundreds of books on this topic, I always go back to my roots. Some of the basic lessons instilled in me as a child are the same lessons that have supported my growth and success as a leader.
Three years ago, I wrote a book for my three adult sons about the important lesso...
Source: hospital impact - March 26, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Memorial Healthcare's Frank Fear: Federal initiatives strain our workforce
by Dan Bowman, FierceHealthIT
For emergency room doctors at Lansing, Mich.-based Memorial Healthcare, the implementation of virtual desktops helped to dramatically improve workflow, according to CIO Frank Fear.
"What really drove our push to implement [for virtual desktops] was a need for quick access to patient data," Fear (pictured) told FierceHealthIT in an interview at HIMSS14 in Orlando, Fla. "We trialed a lot of different technologies like laptops and tablets, but the doctors soon found out that the idea of carrying around a tablet with them just wasn't really effective workflow-wise for them."
In addition to talk...
Source: hospital impact - March 21, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Actuarial management key to changing industry
by Jonathan H. Burroughs
Key stakeholders must back up and align healthcare transformation mandates to achieve high quality and low cost with strong contractual incentives. Healthcare organizations increasingly create co-management or joint venture collaborative arrangements with physicians, large employers and third-party payers to meet the triple aim goals (improving population health, improving the experience of care, and lowering per-capita costs).
UnitedHealth, the nation's largest insurer, will increase its quality/cost incentives to $50 billion within the next five years, and healthcare organizations increasingly ...
Source: hospital impact - March 21, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Create a healthcare environment where employees thrive
by Scott Kashman
What does it take to create an environment where people thrive? In many ways, we all know, although it's often an afterthought. Every organization has goals. Smart leaders focus on their organizations' customers and how to continually improve. It takes a deeper, more optimistic, sincere and caring commitment to truly understand what creates that connection and culture to engage others.
A couple of real-life examples hit home. Recently, I participated in a local half marathon race. While I was not physically conditioned to hit my personal best, I hoped to still enjoy myself and have a good race.
I hav...
Source: hospital impact - March 21, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Senior patient experience leaders needed
by Jason A. Wolf
This headline is not for a job listing. But it should be one you seriously consider.
I and a number of colleagues--from fellow Hospital Impact blogger Anthony Cirillo and first named Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Bridget Duffy, M.D.--continue to stress the importance of having a senior experience leader.
Early investigations at The Beryl Institute showed that organizations possessing a focused senior experience leader tended to outperform others on standard experience surveys. More so, our benchmarking research and surveys from other organizations reinforce that patient experience remains a top priorit...
Source: hospital impact - March 21, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Why nurses deserve a seat at the health IT development table
by Dan Bowman, FierceHealthIT
As the use of technology in healthcare becomes more ubiquitous, one question that deserves more attention is that of the role of nurses in making development and implementation decisions; essentially, what should that role be?
In a recent interview, Elizabeth "Betty" Jordan, R.N., an assistant professor at the University of South Florida College of Nursing, said that nurses should be included in all health IT decisions. From conception to evaluation, she said, nurses deserve a seat at the IT table.
Our healthcare space is getting bigger, and nurses working on those units really rely on tech...
Source: hospital impact - March 14, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
The path to physician reinvention
by Kenneth H. Cohn
It always gives me a good feeling when physicians say to me after a seminar, "You gave me hope."
Physicians are facing a number of losses, from clinical autonomy to financial security, as noted in the Archives of Family Medicine. In general, physicians have done everything asked of them from college through fellowship training.
Yet, something is missing from the lives of many doctors I have worked with across 43 states.
As Joe Tye wrote in "A New Clinical Finding:"
In the sterile quiet of the exam room
doctor ponders the unusual x-ray
What do you prescribe for chest pain
caused by a dying dream
t...
Source: hospital impact - March 14, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Learn from HealthCare.gov failure to survive healthcare change
by Kent Bottles
Healthcare leaders need to read "Code Red: Inside the nightmare launch of HealthCare.gov and the team that figured out how to fix it." Steven Brill's article in the March 10, 2014, issue of Time is a must-read for several reasons.
Every hospital system leader can learn valuable lessons about what to do and what not to do when leading large organizations in an industry that has rarely encountered so much complexity and change in such a short period of time.
In my experience, planning for such an important and complicated project--such as the launch of the Affordable Care Act's exchange website--requires...
Source: hospital impact - March 14, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Communicating with patients: Stick with the tried and true
by Nancy Cawley Jean
Over the years, the way we communicate with patients has changed drastically. I remember the days when, working for a health plan, we would coordinate postal mailings. Then email came along and then text messaging. And of course, there's always been traditional media outlets--television, newspaper and radio.
We've all seen the statistics about how many people are on social media: Seventy-three percent of adults online use a social network and 42 percent use multiple networks. On top of that, reports show at least 50 percent of people get their national and international news from the Internet.
Folk...
Source: hospital impact - March 14, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
The staff experience: Employees have human needs too
by Anthony Cirillo
This month's blog post extends from both my January and February posts. In January, I shared how short-sighted financial decisions hurt patient experience.
In February, I discussed my new role as primary caregiver to my mom, suggesting that instead of focusing on patient experience, we should look at the human experience.
One comment on the January post serves as a good segue for the rest of this piece.
"Health and wellness, just as death and dying, affect all of us. Clinicians and administrators share in the wins and defeats in healthcare. As nurses, we need to be in the mix, collaborating with vari...
Source: hospital impact - March 7, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Extend focus beyond hospitals to truly improve healthcare
by Thomas Dahlborg
The healthcare industry focuses on clinical quality outcomes at the hospital level, especially on preventable readmissions. Funders of healthcare implement both carrots and sticks (incentives and disincentives) to improve quality in this area; however, this sole approach is not enough.
Healthcare is a complex, adaptive system (as is each of our patients, practitioners and organizations), so a focus limited to hospital responsibility regarding care quality is not enough to truly make a difference.
For this discussion, let's expand our view to primary care as well.
Primary care physicians miss between ...
Source: hospital impact - March 7, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Intermountain's Marc Probst on interoperability, Meaningful Use and ICD-10
by Dan Bowman, FierceHealthIT
What's holding the industry back from achieving interoperability? One reason is that it lacks the "wow factor," says Marc Probst. The CIO of Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, who talked exclusively with FierceHealthIT at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives' CIO forum in Orlando, Fla., this week, said interoperability takes vision and patience.
"Inherently, standards aren't very sexy," Probst (pictured) said. "If we said we were going to spend $35 billion to put standards in place, it probably wouldn't have gotten the same lift as putting $35 billion into ...
Source: hospital impact - March 2, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Tech in the pharmacy improves outcomes, med safety
by Steve Kessinger
"Optimizing patient outcomes through interdisciplinary medication management" is our pharmacy department's purpose. Let me elaborate on our recent transition to fulfill that objective.
The implementation of an electronic medical record (EMR) system has profoundly affected efforts to improve medication safety and advance pharmacy practice. Perhaps the most noteworthy endeavor has been the implementation of computerized physician order management (CPOM) functionality. Prior to this project, copies of hand-written medication orders were scanned to the pharmacy department for manual transcription into a p...
Source: hospital impact - March 2, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
Simulation can take healthcare from hierarchy to teamwork
by Lydia Forsythe
Social intricacies surround us. As we walk through our healthcare organizations they exist whether we acknowledge them. Recognizing these social nuances is important, but not easy to do, given the many societal layers and time constraints in our busy and complex health organizations.
In particular, both explicit and implicit activities socially shape healthcare teams. It's hard for new staff and leaders to acclimate to an organization and a team, which sometimes creates retention issues. We can identify and recognize a team's social structures by giving it a voice, and enhance its presence by using a q...
Source: hospital impact - March 2, 2014 Category: Health Managers Authors: Wendy Johnson Source Type: blogs
