HFMA Senior Editor Carole Bolster recently asked Fred Lee, author of If Disney Ran Your Hospital, this question:
If there were one thing you could tell hospital CFOs to do differently, what would it be and why?
Here is what he said:
It would be to elevate the priority status of courtesy relative to efficiency. Disney emphasizes that courtesy is more important than efficiency. If you can rally a culture around that idea, individual department heads and managers will be forced to focus on serving their internal customers instead of focusing on their own budget, because when they focus on their own budget, they get so focused on what is efficient for them that they often cause a lot of extra red tape, bureaucracy, unresponsiveness, and frustration for their internal customers. And if you focus on your own internal efficiency, communication breaks down because you’re not considering how to serve your internal customer better. You’re thinking only of ways of pushing some work off of your own department’s plate onto to your customer’s plate, causing even more frustration. I wish there was a way in health care for this paradigm to shift somewhat between every department focusing on efficiency first and every department focusing on courtesy first. Of course, overall, we understand that safety is first, so I’m really talking about where we go once safety is assured.
It would be to elevate the priority status of courtesy relative to efficiency. Disney emphasizes that courtesy is more important than efficiency. If you can rally a culture around that idea, individual department heads and managers will be forced to focus on serving their internal customers instead of focusing on their own budget, because when they focus on their own budget, they get so focused on what is efficient for them that they often cause a lot of extra red tape, bureaucracy, unresponsiveness, and frustration for their internal customers. And if you focus on your own internal efficiency, communication breaks down because you’re not considering how to serve your internal customer better. You’re thinking only of ways of pushing some work off of your own department’s plate onto to your customer’s plate, causing even more frustration.
I wish there was a way in health care for this paradigm to shift somewhat between every department focusing on efficiency first and every department focusing on courtesy first. Of course, overall, we understand that safety is first, so I’m really talking about where we go once safety is assured.
Let us know whether you agree. Look for the full interview with Fred Lee in the April issue of hfm magazine. You can see Fred Lee speak at HFMA's ANI 2006.
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