What This Blog is About

A long time mentor and friend, Cicely Berry, often says: "all we do comes from our need to survive".

Cis is the Voice Director of The Royal Shakespeare Company. Her profound work and deep appreciation of the human spirit has affected diverse communities all over the world.

http://www.im21stcentury.com
http://www.salvatorerasa.com
Will take you to my current work.

This blog is dedicated to the belief that the overall health of a community or organization is a clear reflection of their ability to communicate.

"Cada cabeza es un mundo" - Cuban proverb

"Every head is a world"




Thursday, December 20, 2007

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

Friday, December 14, 2007

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

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

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