Incentives & What They Can Encourage

The reimbursement system “tolerates and even financially rewards poor performance by hospitals that fail to prevent hospital-acquired complications,'’ write the report’s authors, Dr. Heidi Wald and Dr. Andrew Kramer, health care policy researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver. - December 19, 2007, NY Times Making Hospitals Pay for Their Mistakes

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/making-hospitals-pay-for-their-mistakes/

In our work place we do not often think of incentives as something connected to fundamental issues. They often become clever or simplistic solutions to what are truly fragmented apparent issues instead of deeper needs.

This article sites specific examples of how incentives in hospitals may actually create harm. It is worth looking at for an understanding of a more pervasive issue. The above url will also give you some blog responses that disagree and some that do not.

The article suggests that in most businesses, such reward for poor performance does not occur. However, I suggest that hospitals as businesses are presently emanating many other business models. And, that the use of incentives in many companies today (often driven by an outdated mentality), deserve a closer look.

Once again, health care, the well-being of an organization and its ability to communicate are connected for all of us.

Sal

Designing the 'Care' into Health Care

"Improving the user experience could inspire people to tap into the system more regularly to help stave off more serious illness"

This article comes from an interesting perspective. Taking a look at what the patient is looking for from a designer's perspective. User centric needs is a subject that e-business advocates have understood for years now. Interesting to see the same fundamental logic put to a discussion of health care. Worth reading.

"To a designer's eye, efficiently providing for a basic need is indeed the fundamental issue. But it should be possible to go beyond rudimentary solutions to achieve the overall objective of a healthy population by also addressing an essential question: What does the individual want and need from the experience of health care?"

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2007/id20071121_967757.htm

Communicating Today & A Personal Note

"The application of technology has reduced differences among the productivity of transformational and transactional employees, but huge inconsistencies persist in the productivity of high-value tacit ones. Improving it is more about increasing their effectiveness for instance, by focusing them on interactions that create value and ensuring that they have the right information and context than about efficiency. Technology tools that promote tacit interactions, such as wikis, virtual team environments, and videoconferencing, may become no less ubiquitous than computers are now. As companies learn to use these tools, they will develop managerial innovations smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate. Companies in sectors such as health care and banking are already moving down this road". -

Eight business technology trends to watch

James M. Manyika, Roger P. Roberts, and Kara L. Sprague

December 2007, McKinsey Quarterly

This observation from the McKinsey authors is certainly true as they advise executives to understand that "Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business".

Technology is meant to carry out our intentions and that requires our ability to communicate clearly. In health care, a complicated world of the urgent and the measured use of skill and expertise, too much today gets in the way of connecting peoples' abilities and peoples' needs.

I have written before of my brilliant uncle, the business man and social innovator. Just before Thanksgiving, on the evening of his 97th birthday, he died. Still brilliant and provocative and knowing. His pacemaker replacement had been successful but with some complications. Painfully, I will always believe that a major complication was the contractual relationship that the facilitating hospitals had to complete the surgery and aftercare. He just stayed in the hospital too long with too much transportation from one place to another for simple tasks to be performed.

Communicating in today's world often means implementing at the same time. For my great great uncle, this was something he clearly understood.

Sal

Communication Today & A Personal Note