This week I was a surgeon’s patient in the hospital (great job, mending well, nothing serious). Usually, I am advising hospital CEOs and leaders how to transform their cultures, create inspiring systems, identify and realize strategies and build efficient organizations. So this was quite a different perspective – and one that generated fresh insights.

If we want to reinvent healthcare, here are three easy tips I learned while wearing one of those ridiculous hats, goofy slippers and backwards-facing gowns:

1. Intact Teams: Between being admitted and discharged I encountered a dozen nurses – a pre-op nurse, a registration nurse (and five more talking to each other behind the counter), an admitting nurse, the waiting room nurse, a nurse who put me on the gurney, several nurses in the OR, nurses in the post-op recovery room and, finally, more than one nurse in the recovery room prior to discharge. This is how it used to be in the auto industry years ago too. A car (like the patient) would be touched separately by specialists – designers, engineers, marketers, salespeople, manufacturing, legal, operations, quality control, distribution, warehousing, logistics, and so on. This was one of the many inefficiencies that brought the auto industry to its knees and bankruptcy. The solution was to create much smaller, cross-functional teams that stayed with the car from beginning to end. This gave the small teams a much more efficient overview of the entire process, better communication with each other, a product the customer actually wanted, less waste and surplus activity, lower costs and the opportunity for continuous improvements along the way. Why don’t we do this in hospitals? When we hand off the patient from nurse A to nurse B, besides what’s written on the charts, neither one has any sense of the patient’s history while in the hands of the other. We can simplify this process by assigning a small, dedicated nursing team that stays with the patient from beginning to end, who monitors progress and efficacy along the way, understands the entire process and thus delivers a higher-quality service at lower cost – in other words we could learn from the auto industry.
2. Inventory Control: As I was leaving the recovery room prior to discharge, the nurse very helpfully offered me some dressings to take home. I noticed that every patient birth had a supply of assorted dressings, as well as boxes of rubber gloves, Kleenex and numerous other supplies. It isn’t really necessary to have so much inventory in every location. Why not centralize this locally so that unnecessary stocks of inventory are not liberally distributed throughout the system?
3.  Inspiring the Patient. And lastly, let’s talk about customer service. Great organizations get that way through consistency.  Most healthcare systems lack consistency – especially in customer service. Some staff are dragons and bears and others are delightful charmers. Clearly, this is directly correlated with the quality of leadership. Visiting a hospital can be dangerous (one can die), risky (one can catch something), frightening (often we do not know what is going to happen or what’s going on), and wretched (some of the staff can be downright nasty). It doesn’t have to be this way.  A culture that is committed to inspiring the patient through every stage of their journey could be just as exciting, interesting and rewarding as going to the movies or a fine restaurant or a theme park. It’s just a matter of commitment and attitude –we can make it happen if we choose to.

Let’s choose to make healthcare more inspiring, more efficient, less of a hassle and more effective.

…and if you want to laugh so hard you might need a nurse – read David Barry’s account of his colonoscopy.