Healthcare Leadership Can Mean

Only One Thing… and it’s NOT

Obamacare or “Lean” Management

Thirty years of healthcare and medical practice-development have led me to conclude that some doctors, many therapists and most nurses get it! They understand that healthcare and healthcare leadership is personal, professional and passionate.

Sadly, a great many healthcare business executives and a good number of providers have sidetracked themselves into thinking that HEALTHCARE is all about slogans, smiling doctor billboards, malpractice insurance fees and reimbursement battles.

Reckless opinionated media “reporting” has drawn healthcare providers and business managers into a tangle of confusion. Talking heads thrive on using every opportunity to convolute issues, stir up doubt, be confrontational, and aggrandize politicians who support their network bosses and stockholders. It’s all a game, and we the people are losing.

Increasingly, government political (and more quietly, insurance company) empty suits are playing God. They are continually trying to convince the world that they are answering the call for qualified healthcare leadership. They, after all, proclaim to know more than we do about what diagnostic, treatment, and doctor choice decisions are best for each of us and our families.

They can live in Nevada and pretend to understand what healthcare is about in New Jersey or Tennessee or Maine. I don’t think so! They’re just protecting their own political profiles, pursuits and plans. And many top healthcare executives simply add fuel to the fire by talking and acting like healthcare is simply a maze of administrative or operational management techniques, methods, or styles that they alone have the answers to.

Well, guess what? Reality Check:

HEALTHCARE IS ABOUT PEOPLE!

You’re healthy, you want to stay healthy. You’re sick, you want to get healthy. That’s it! What part of “get and stay healthy” is so hard to understand?

What are all these other hocus-pocus theories, political scams, new tech apps, insurance deals, Congressional posturing, and media “findings” but diversionary tactics? Is it or is it not “dancing around the issues” in an attempt to look good, or to make money, or to win votes . . . instead of just sitting down and solving the damn problem?

Healthcare professionals justifiably rely heavily on emerging technology and associated improvements in methodologies like the “Lean” management fad. But (and this is a big but) . . . BUT these are only tools. In the wrong hands, even a hammer can miss driving nails.

The bottom line is that leadership in healthcare

means stepping up to more than a diagnostic or

treatment provider role. It means having an

Advocacy Attitude . . . being on the patient’s side!

Imagine if every encounter a patient or patient family had with a healthcare provider could be –as was recently noted here in exemplary fashion by Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute provider and provider support staffers– a remarkable, high-five, bend-over-backwards experience . . . professional providers and caregivers acting like advocates on behalf of each patient and family!

Imagine if every patient and patient family could be trained in advance of every provider diagnostic or treatment exam to better manage anxiety. My best guess is that 3-4 minutes of every doctor exam are consumed with getting the patient to relax. With a 12-minute per patient insurance company limit imposed on the doctor in order to be reimbursed, that leaves 8-9 minutes to diagnose or treat . . . none of which ordinarily go well when distress is present. This is not rocket science. It is not a Madison Avenue branding campaign. It is not politics. It is reality.

Done correctly, these solutions cost nothing but initial investments in time and energy and perhaps some coaching. What’s the expected result? More accurate diagnostic readings and better receptivity to treatments. Happier patients and patient families (whose testimonials to others increase volume and referrals), improved staff teamwork, happier provider and staff and their families (who benefit from “take home” method values). Even happier insurance providers.

So, if skills, training and experience are all present, the “tipping point” factor comes full circle back to, yes, bedside manners!

It’s the “CARE” in HEALTHCARE!

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Like Nero with Rome,

Obama Fiddles

While America Burns

And not unlike one of Aesop’s Fables, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, mainstream media talking heads reported once again today that the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery. How nice. Do YOU believe it any more?

Some of these feeble excuses for “reporters” need to talk to the plummeting dollar, soaring fuel costs, unemployment lines, and some of the Americans I’ve felt saddened to see rummaging through fastfood and convenience store garbage pails and dumpsters for food scraps.

Has your business been interviewed? 

We have of course heard this type of hype (floating somewhere between make-believe and outright lying) every day since Mr, Obama moved into the White House.

Checked the gas pumps lately?

I mean, really folks. First of all, we who visit this blog are small business and professional practice owners and managers. We are entrepreneurs. We are professional salespeople. We represent the leading edge in business, technology, education and healthcare.

We–to use Mr. Obama’s own “words of the week”—are not stupid!

$4 a gallon and rising? 

Even IF gas pump prices were simply a fuel-for-our-vehicles issue, we might live with it. Unfortunately, it’s Dominoes! Skyrocketing fuel costs mean skyrocketing delivery costs and skyrocketing food costs and skyrocketing travel and airfare costs. All these “burstings in air” and it’s not even July 4th!

And to top it all off, the grand tsunami of costs that are tangled up with “Obamacare” will be paid by small business for decades to come, providing free healthcare for those unwilling to earn it, including (unbelievably) illegal aliens!

If you’re trying to figure all of this out, think politics. Reality is that we do not have a national leader who understands or practices or even cares about leadership. He fiddles while our nation’s reputation and respect dissolves away. What would happen if you tried to get away with that in your business?

He fiddles while his reckless socialist agenda spending disregards the lives of small business owners and managers who work hard for a living, who contribute most to society to begin with, who have the most promise to offer for real economic turnaround. Why? Because he doesn’t care and he doesn’t get it. All that matters is politics . . . 

Voter dependency delivers voter votes!

(Listen to his speeches. They are A~L~L campaign speeches. A~L~L.) 

The more that government continues to intercede in our lives and businesses, the greater the dependency on government that’s created.

The more dependent on government we become, the more beholden we become for what government decides to give us, the more we vote for government generosity in order to live.

Is that sick or what?

Sorry, fellow business owners, but I doubt this is why any of us are in business. Lured by The Great American Dream, and the rights granted us as “We the people” by the Constitution of the United States –and as one nation under God– we are in business to help ourselves, our families, those for whom we can create jobs, and our communities.

We are in business to create opportunities to give back to the communities that support us from the only place that makes sense — from a position of strength. 

Our present government seeks to be THE ONLY source of strength.

Frustrating? Inconceivable? This is why I will not let go of these issues. They are at least as important for each of us to deal with as our our own employees, customers, balance sheets, income statements, brands, operations, revenue streams, and innovative leadership. Our federal government is over-stepping its bounds every single day.

Isn’t it time to step up to the plate and make your voice heard? There are 30 million small businesses in America. Just imagine what’s possible if each of us would just speak up . . .  

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

These networks,” the doctor continued, “and the borderline-Marxist viewpoint candidates they ushered into the spotlight, have managed to captivate and control your brain!”  

     “I’m sorry to tell you this, my friend, but you,” the doctor leered cynically over the tops of his reading glasses as he shifted his stethoscope from his neck to his shoulders and frowned parentally, “you have a severe case of NMD, and I’m going to recommend you go directly to the hospital for some immediate transfusions.  I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

     “Aaaaah, NMD?  Twenty minutes?” 

     “Well, yes, Network Media Disorder, and, yes, I can squeeze one more patient into my insurance-company-alloted 12-minute maximum-per-patient examination time period, and still have eight minutes to get to the hospital, which is ten minutes away, but I drive fast!”

     “Er, no, Doc!  I’m needing a little bit more explanation from you than that before I go racing over to the ER for this mysterious transfusion that you seem to have prescribed just a little too quick for my liking.  Am I going to die within the next half hour or what?”

     “No, nothing like that.  It’s just that you need immediate attention or –it’s possible within any given hour– you may find that you have allowed yourself to be brainwashed  beyond repair!” 

     The good doctor tugged at his shirtcollar, took a deep breath and proceeded, “You see, by the time the election ended last week, you had already built up a rampaging attachment to CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, TNT, and MSNBC (and MSNBC all by itself is a rather astonishing attachment considering only seven people in all of America actually watch it!).  

     In the process, your dormant benevalence greeted these screaming liberal radical networks with open arms and you were rapidly transformed into a wild-eyed supporter of electing our nation’s most management-inexperienced, Disneyworld-fantasizing team of candidates in all of history. 

     “These networks,” the doctor continued, “and the borderline-Marxist viewpoint candidates they ushered into the spotlight, have managed to captivate and control your brain.  It was not easy, but with at least $650 million in mysterious campaign donations lining their pockets, they could afford to take some bold and assertive thrusts into your skull, and convince you that change was the answer to the world’s problems, and that the candidates they supported were the second coming of the agents of change.

     “. . . and you, my friend bought into it.  Now you must pay the price of setting yourself up to be thoroughly brainwashed.  It’s either a lobotomy or a transfusion of the fair and balanced FOX network, mixed with some Rush and Sean and Michael and Mark and Laura and Greta, and a few other saviors of society.

     “You need these transfusions before the newly elected dictator attempts to disarm talk radio with his backer’s so-called Fairness Doctrine (it could not possibly be more inappropriately named!) . . . an extraordinarily sick platform if you ask me.  So that, in a nutshell, is why I want you to hurry on over to the ER.  The longer you wait, the more these talking heads will infiltrate your brain, the more you become a sheep, and then we will have some truly major medical challenges to face!”

     “Well, it’s true, Doc, I have become addicted.  I mean Wolfe and Katie and the rest really have welcomed me into their network families and I am afraid of missing even C-Span at this point.  I suppose a little re-balancing wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  I mean, I do rotate my tires, even.”        Halalpiar 

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