Robert Fromberg
Editor-in-Chief, HFMA
My younger brother has a difficult time at a buffet. The chicken or the ham? The biscuits or the bread sticks? The cobbler or the cake? My brother’s buffet problem was exacerbated by the fact that he both worked and ate each day at a university cafeteria.
My brother has autism. One of the many and varied symptoms of autism is an inability to make the logical steps and intuitive leaps that characterize our everyday decision-making. This problem may be especially evident among many people with autism, but it sure isn’t limited to them.
We all occasionally have trouble choosing between the pasta primavera and the ravioli, the Lincoln biography and the Grisham thriller, or the urgent phone call and the urgent e-mail message.
The importance grows rapidly as the decisions become more strategic. Launch a new product or increase sales of an existing product? Diversify your services or focus on your core business? Staff up or outsource?
In this month’s cover story in hfm magazine, “Growing the Top Line,” Mark Grube offers some context for and examples of strategic decision-making in health care today. He explains why hospital revenues need to grow and why operational efficiency and an effective revenue cycle must be accompanied by volume growth. He identifies the information needed to make decisions among the possible strategies to achieve growth. And he offers several examples of strategies that hospitals and health systems have chosen and successfully implemented.
All of this good information may be best summarized in a quote that Grube presents from GE chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt: “You have to have a plan, and you have to stick with it. You have to modify it at times, but every day you’ve got to get out there and play it hard.”
Need to decide whether to return the phone call or answer the e-mail message? You may not need a formal plan, but you do need some criteria in place that you rely on to set priorities. Need to decide whether to strengthen your local market share or increase your geographic reach? Then you really need a plan--one that considers a multitude of market and internal factors. And as Grube suggests, you need to work that plan, or the capital markets will have “significant cause for concern.”
During his first weeks on the job at the university cafeteria, my brother would stand, tray in hand, on his lunch breaks and stare at the options, unable to choose, a growing line of grumbling college students behind him. But with a little help, he made a plan. He mapped out the foods offered on most days and a schedule for which days he would choose which foods. Within a week or two, he was breezing through the line like a pro and proud of the accomplishment. Whether we learn this lesson from the chairman and CEO of GE or from an autistic man working at a cafeteria, it’s a lesson worth learning.
