Just Got Word

When I experience the ideological resistance and the nit-picking dogging the creators of the Health Care Reform Act, such as what I just read in an e-newsletter put out by a big-4 accounting firm, it reminds me of what I read in the mid-1990's in the Rockland Journal News .  At the time, I had two children in the Clarkstown Central School District, in Rockland County, New York, so this particular local news item caught my eye.  A reporter for the Rockland Journal News had asked a Clarkstown teacher, who happened to be heavily involved in the New York State Teacher's Union, how the District was incorporating new computer technology into classroom curriculum.  The teacher's/union rep's response?  "We tried that in the '60s and it didn't work."  The article made no mention of the District's attempt to overcome the computer hurdles/union resistance experienced 30 years' before.  So I guess one could conclude that in the face of the most incredible...

Hospitals in the U.S. are aggressively seeking new sources of revenue because their traditional sources of revenue are drying up.  There are a number of potential solutions to the pervasive revenue problem, and tPF is positioned to help hospitals arrive at the right one.  We have developed a readiness assessment tool that will explore the possibilities, including: expand the hospital's service area to increase the size of the pool and dilute risk recruit steering physicians away from nearby, competing hospitals establish partnerships with other hospitals and insurance companies. Unfortunately, the "do nothing right now" approach doesn't mean things will stay the same.  In fact, chances are good that the do nothing approach will make things worse since even a minimal approach might include some preservation/defensive measures.  For example, if hospital B comes into your hospital's service area and acquires those physicians that normally refer p...

While sitting in an American Hospital Association seminar in the The Washington Hilton last month, I was amazed at the vacuum that exists out in US hospital leadership around what structures and models to use to improve group and individual performance.  Three hospital CEOs got up and presented to around 100 hospital CEOs -- talking about how they had transformed their cultures using the Baldrige criteria.   The audience reaction was pretty much revealed during the question and answer session.  That is, everyone there was fascinated with the transformations these three executives had created in their respective hospital settings.  But the audience wasn't necessarily turned on by the outdated Baldrige model as a means of achieving new, positive results.  There is a good reason for their pained expressions -- the "solution" touted by the speakers is outdated and ineffective.  For example, Baldrige, on their site, has made a half-hearted attempt to s...