I recently read in a magazine aimed at the hospital administrator market that administrators make the decision to terminate their facility’s relationship with a physician group because it makes business sense to do so, and that emotion is not a part of the equation.
Although I have certainly met many hospital administrators who had no personality, or at least no readily ascertainable redeeming characteristics, they were still, to the best of my knowledge, people.
And people can’t separate emotions from decision-making. They can lie about it and claim emotions are not a factor, but it’s frankly impossible for emotions not to be a major driver of decision-making.
The lesson here is not that physician groups can ignore the quality of their service, including the quality of responsiveness to a hospital administration’s issues. That would be foolish.
But it would be equally foolish to believe that strategies based on emotion have little value when in fact behavioral economists and psychologists who study decision-making clearly acknowledge how irrational our emotion laden decision-making it really is.
Knowing how to develop emotion-based strategies and how to implement them are simply among the “combined arms” tools that medical groups must develop in order to thrive.
