“Mark, it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.”
What we’re really after is efficacy, not efficiency. But that’s harder to measure. Like love, you know it when you feel it, but we can’t objectively measure it.
Far too often, medical groups – in fact, closely held businesses of all kinds – have bombs, of sorts, within them, too.
Coups and business cloning often decimate medical groups.
Both Washington and Lincoln were exceptional. Thrust into lives that they wanted but didn’t want, from pasts of trial and error, and failure upon failure. Self-promoters whose careers didn’t follow a smooth arithmetic progression.
People — all of us, from Joe and Josie on the street to hospital administrators on the third floor — have an innate desire to be led.
Certainly no one wants to be seen as an easy target, but in many cases a quick resolution of a patient’s unhappiness is far cheaper than the costs of a dispute.
Steve Jobs famously believed public demand wasn’t important in terms of identifying the market for new products.
Like a dry cleaner, healthcare providers have to screw up to lose a customer’s loyalty. Dry cleaners know that once they attract a customer, it’s extremely likely that he or she will continue to patronize the store for years unless the dry cleaner does something to wreck the relationship.
Value is what’s important to your customer. Not to you.