Patients Come Second: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead

A mentor of mine once shared a very simple equation with me: If employees and physicians are happy, you’ll get an increase in patient volume. If you increase volume, you’ll find ways to decrease cost. With that, you’ll increase margin and be able to invest back in employees.

engaged employees will drive higher patient satisfaction, so too will the combination of high employee and patient measurements push profits higher.

Great employees, on the other hand, will find solutions with a smile on their face—saving the relationship and maybe even making it stronger along the way. The same principle holds true in health care. Whether you are purchasing a cup of coffee or having your hip replaced, your decision comes down to three elements: cost, quality, and service.

definition of patient experience: “the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perception across the continuum of care.”

The key, as Dane Peterson, CEO of Emory University Hospital Midtown, told us, is to create a culture where the engaged employees significantly outnumber the disengaged, perhaps by a four-to-one or even a five-to-one ratio. “When this happens, the disengaged go quiet and lose their negative impact on the culture,” he pointed out. That should be one

This is something even the feared military leader General George S. Patton understood all too well. When it came to how his soldiers dressed, how they carried themselves on and off the battlefield, and even how they saluted, Patton was as old school as they came. But when it came to how those same soldiers named and decorated their tanks, well, Old

Personality tests are a really effective tool—an early-warning system of sorts—to help spot the rotten apples through the camouflage of an impressive resume.

Consider that the lifetime value of a single patient to a hospital is some $250,000.

It turns out the wait times weren’t the true issue. Patients expected to wait at the doctor’s office! It was the unknown, and the apparent lack of concern, that drove them crazy.