"We decided in 2005 that no hospital executive could apply to work in this (ambulatory) company. We wanted entrepreneurs who were more open to a different way of providing healthcare services. That has been very, very successful."

--Dan Wolterman, president and CEO of Houston-based Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, Texas' largest not-for-profit health system, from an interview in Modern Healthcare.

6:35 PM

"Stop Blaming the Patient!"

From MedCityNews.com: "Mayo doc: Stop blaming patients. Healthcare industry’s take on non-compliance is all wrong."

Dr. Victor Montori offers some great riffs on engagement:

Non-compliance is frequently talked about as a cost and a burden put on the healthcare system by patients. But Montori’s theory is that really, it’s the healthcare system over-burdening the patient.

“We have to be very careful not to blame the patients,” Montori said during his closing keynote at MedCity’s ENGAGE on Thursday. “A lot of the conversation (around patient engagement) has been, how do we get them to do stuff? To me, that’s not engagement."

[...]

Montori closed by asserting that the U.S. healthcare system will be the best in the world only when it begins to shrink. “Healthcare right now is all about itself. Healthcare right now is about how do we get bigger, more market share,” he said. “That means that patients have to take more medicine, have to monitor themselves more often [...] We will have the best healthcare system in the world when it becomes the first healthcare system that shrinks.”

9:23 AM

10 Ways to Stay On Top Of the Innovation Heap

The authors of Booz & Company's "Global Innovation 1,000 Report" offer their Top 10 things innovative companies do right (via Business Insider.com)

1. At innovative companies, everybody is an innovator.
2. Innovative companies measure their idea-generation success.
3. Innovative companies change the idea a lot before it becomes a product.
4. Innovative companies test their idea with customers.
5. Innovative companies have an internal "idea czar."
6. Innovative companies talk to customers and other partners.
7. Innovative companies find ideas everywhere.
8. Innovative companies generate ideas in three basic ways:
1. Need seekers: what do customers want?
2. Market readers: quickly create improvements on market trends.
3. Technology drivers: letting their tech experts experiment.
9. Innovative companies spend R&D money thoughtfully, not profligately.
10. Innovative companies systematically create new ideas.

Though healthcare (big pharma, mostly) is heavily represented, healthcare providers are not.   Not unexpectedly, few of these 10 activities play to providers' strengths or fit naturally into a typical hospital culture.  Outside of a few organizations like Cleveland Clinic, there's a lot more innovation 'talking' than innovation 'doing.'  Maybe it's the first step in a journey of recovery - admitting you have a problem, er, opportunity.

Read the entire article, here.

8:14 AM

Why Can't Healthcare Solve Its Own Problems?

An interesting question posed at HealthLeadersMedia.com. 4 health leaders offer wide-ranging suggestions, including building trust and collaboration, reducing the number of stakeholders yet finding ways to work together, and reforming the tort liability system.

Hard to argue against 'more trust' isn't it? Yet it's axiomatic in healthcare that one person's 'waste' is another person's 'income stream.' You mess with my income stream and I may have a problem trusting you.

"Go get some trust..." sounds a little like comedian Steve Martin's promise to teach us how to be rich. Says Martin, "First, go find $1 million dollars!" Umm, OK. I'll go find some trust while I'm at it and fix healthcare's problems too.

Maybe it's fair to consider the requirements for more trust. What preceeds trust? What creates the right conditions for trust to occur? There's no tried-and-true formula, no "add two parts water, stir and presto! Trust!"

No, but a strong sense of leadership COURAGE is my personal formula.

As a herd-driven industry, healthcare suffers from an acute lack of courage. We're more comfortable doing things once they've been validated by a Modern Healthcare cover story (think most of what passes for healthcare strategy) or the Federal government bribes us to do them (think EMRs.)

(As an aside, I've always wanted to conduct an experiment with the strategic plans of 50 randomly-selected healthcare organizations, I'd rip off all the covers, mix up the plans and then challenge the assembled executives to pick THEIR plan out of the pile. I'd offer an award to the few who could and free consulting to the rest. But I digress...)

Yes, trust is in the problem-solving mix. But instead of an initial condition, might trust be an outcome of courageous problem-solving? Of courageously and correctly identifying the problem? Positing strong if initially unpopular countermeasures? Stepping out, taking action? Of showing courage in acting on a compelling "...make no small plans" vision, a vision with which others can enthusiastically engage?

Nobody trusts who or what they don't respect, somebody who minimizes the challenges in favor of business as usual. Nobody trusts the Captain saying "We're taking on a little water" when all the passengers know the iceberg tore a huge gash in the hull and the ship's listing 30 degrees to port.

Say what you want about lemmings and 'Fraidy Cats, fuzzy, lovable critters all. But would you trust one sufficiently to follow?

8:21 AM

Steve Jobs On Process Vs. Innovation

“The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.
“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important." [BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2004]

7:32 AM

"These Aren't Your Typical Loos..."

From Seattlepi.com:

"These aren't your typical loos. One uses microwave energy to transform human waste into electricity. Another captures urine and uses it for flushing. And still another turns excrement into charcoal."

Read more, here.

2:00 PM

Healthcare's Biggest Problem Is...

...too much money.  Wait.  What?

Interesting opinion yesterday from the blogosphere, that healthcare's biggest problem is too much money.  Too many resources, leading to too many people, too much time spent deliberating and too few imperatives toward action.

That's why, in our best leisurely fashion, we approve capital budgets just once a year.  Miss the cycle and it's 'wait 'til next year.'  And that's OK; it's not like it's life & death or anything.

Making the cycle, especially in IT, means launching RFP processes lasting another year and pilot projects lasting one more.  And system-wide rollouts lasting two more...assuming everything goes as planned, which it seldom does.  (Can you count to five?)

That's why off-the-shelf solutions costing 'a little' are rejected in favor of customized (yet corporate-approved) offerings costing twice as much and taking thrice as long.

That's why $8.99 iPhone apps are pooh-poohed as "not serious" and "risky" while the entry-level price for "real" software seemingly starts at $250k, rising rapidly after that.  (Ask me sometime about Voxie vs. the IT geeks.)

That's why our systems for cancer care are confusing messes yet our answer is to add yet another layer of staffing and expense - "Nurse Navigators" they're called.  I guess we'll start on that whole cost reduction and process simplification thing sometime tomorrow. 

And so we have armies of bureaucrats and analysts and process sponsors, technicians, project managers, coordinators and specialists.  We need them all to churn the system...and still we think of ourselves as understaffed.

And thus committees proliferate, PowerPoint becomes the organization's lingua franca, and, typically, the "back of the house" systems (Finance, IT, HR) are far more modern than "front of the house," customer-facing offerings.  When did YOU start offering patients an on-line portal and how many revenue cycle systems came and went before the portal's go-live?

Take away that money, most of the people and all of the committees.  Remove the luxury of time.  What's left? A startup mentality where cheap is better than expensive and free is best of all.  Where costs avoided mean making payroll...or not.  Where new customers this afternoon are better than impressive forecasts two years out.  Where a bias to action always trumps endless discussion.

What's Out: big checks to license Microsoft's crappy software (oops, is my bias showing?)  What's In: free Google apps.

What's Out: elaborate performance monitoring and benchmarking systems.  What's in: free daily tracking from iDoneThis.

Money gives you the luxury of time and lessens the pressure of deliberation.  That's not always a good thing.  And it's why a million little, ankle-biting startups are about to eat hospitals for lunch.  I'm just sayin.'

UPDATE:  Don't believe me?  Read "What We Can Learn From Third-World Health Care" by Pauline W. Chen, M.D., writing in the New York Times:

"The key to their success is an unabashed disregard for some of our most cherished assumptions about what constitutes good care. Instead of providing antibiotics, CT scans and high-tech interventions, Partners in Health considers basic necessities like food and housing as critical components of the group’s medical work. Instead of asking patients to travel miles to the only clinic and see only the doctor or nurse, they train cadres of community health workers who can monitor, administer and advise in the heart of local villages and in people’s homes.

"Applied to organizations in the United States, this approach has proved startlingly effective, as the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment, or PACT, program has demonstrated. PACT targets some of the poorest and sickest patients with H.I.V. and other chronic illnesses in the greater Boston area. Just like Partners in Health, PACT relies extensively on community health workers who are trained in tasks like helping patients take their medications and make it to clinic appointments as well as reviewing their pantries and teaching them to prepare healthy meals. Applying these broad definitions of care, PACT has significantly decreased the number of emergency room visits and life-threatening opportunistic infections, cut hospitalization rates by 60 percent and yielded a 16 percent savings for Medicaid."

8:21 AM

Healthcare CEO's Guide to Avoiding the Newspaper Industry's Mistakes

Imagine an industry, slow-moving, comfortable and secure in assuming its own irreplaceability.  Health care?  Well, yes,  But also newspapers, and therein lies a lesson or two.

From Forbes here's the Healthcare CEO's Guide to Avoiding Newspaper Industry Mistakes: (note that the underlined emphases are mine.)

"Health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a dramatic industry change. Turn back the clock 15 years and the following dynamics were present:

• Newspaper leaders knew full well that dramatic change was underway and even made some tactical investments. However they didn’t fundamentally rethink their model.
• Newspapers were comfortable as monopoly or oligopoly businesses allowing for plodding decisions. Their IT infrastructure mirrored the plodding pace with expensive and rigid technology architectures.
• Newspaper companies bought up other newspaper chains and took on huge debt.
• Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
• Depending on one’s perspective, it was the best of times or the worst of times to be a leader of local media enterprise.

"Before they knew it, owning massive capital assets and the accompanying crushing debt became unsustainable. The capital barrier to entry transformed into a boat anchor while nimble competition dismissed as ankle-biters created a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts dynamic. Competitively, newspaper companies worried only about other media companies or even Microsoft, but their undoing was driven by a combination of craigslist, monster.com, cars.com, eBay, and countless other marketing substitutes for their advertisers. In addition, there were easier ways to get news than newspapers. Generally, the newspaper’s digital groups were either marginalized or unbearably shackled so that the encumbered digital leaders left to join more aggressive competitors. The enabling technology to reinvent local media didn’t come from legacy IT vendors who’d long sold to newspaper companies, but from “no name” technologies such as WordPress, Drupal and the like.
"The parallels with health systems today are clear. Consider the present dynamics:

• Health systems have been aggressively gobbling up other healthcare providers and frequently taking on debt to finance the growth. Concurrently, health systems often have capital project plans that equal their annual revenues even though no expert believes the answer to healthcare’s hyperinflation is building more buildings. Consider the duplicative $430 million being spent in San Diego to build two identical facilities just a few miles apart as Exhibit A of the problem. Studying other countries that shifted from a “sick care” to a “health care” system, more than half of their hospitals closed. They simply weren’t needed or weren’t appropriate.
• Until recently, complex medical procedures always took place in an acute care hospital setting. Increasingly they are being done more and more in specialty facilities that can do a high volume of particular procedures at a signifiantly lower cost.
• Just as newspapers were implementing multimillion dollar IT systems while nimble competitors were using low and no cost software to disrupt the local media landscape, health systems are similarly implementing complex systems to automate the complexity necessary in a multi-faceted system. Meanwhile, disruptive innovators are implementing new models at a fraction of the cost and time. For example, it’s well understood that a healthy primary care system is the key to increasing the health of a population. Imagine if a fraction of the billions being spent by mission-driven, non-profit health systems on automating complexity was redirected towards the reinvigoration of primary care. They’d further their mission and lower their costs. Of course, they’d likely see revenues drop but presumably maximizing revenues isn’t the mission of a non-profit.
• The plodding pace and scale of innovation at most health systems isn’t up to the enormity of the task. The vast majority of health system innovation teams are constrained by how they have to fit innovation into an existing infrastructure. That approach rarely, if ever, leads to breakthroughs, as its true intent is to make tweaks to a current system rather than a rethink from the ground up.

Great article, one that should be required reading for every hospital CEO, board member and executive team.  The rest of you innovators and disrupters needn't bother.

7:23 AM

Doctors vs. Algorithms?

Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms, asks Vinod Khosla.  The answer may surprise those of you spending your days worrying about an impending physician shortage.

"Eventually, we won’t need the average doctor and will have much better and cheaper care for 90-99% of our medical needs. We will still need to leverage the top 10 or 20% of doctors (at least for the next two decades) to help that bionic software get better at diagnosis. So a world mostly without doctors (at least average ones) is not only not reasonable, but also more likely than not. There will be exceptions, and plenty of stories around these exceptions, but what I am talking about will most likely be the rule and doctors may be the exception rather than the other way around.

...

"What is important to realize is how medical education and the medical profession will change toward the better as a result of these trends. The vision I am proposing here, though, is one in which those decades of learning and experience are used where they actually matter. We consider doctors some of the most learned people in our society. We should aim to use their time and knowledge in the most efficient manner possible. And everybody should have access to the skills of the very best ones instead of only having access to the average doctor. And the not so “Dr. House’ doctors will help us with better patient skills, bedside manners, empathy, advice and caring, and they will have more time for that too. If computers can drive cars and deal with all the knowledge in jeopardy, surely their next to next to next…generation can do diagnosis, treatment and teaching in these far less uncertain domains and with a lot more data. Further the equalizing impact of both electronic doctors and teaching environments has hugely positive social implications. Besides, who wants to be treated by an “average” doctor? And who does not want to be an empowered patient?"

In just a few paragraphs, Khosla defines healthcare's future. Though I happen to agree, what I find somewhat depressing is that hospitals will sit, wait and have it done TO them, missing out entirely on the future's new, exciting value streams. Missing the opportunity to participate, to benefit and to re-envision the hospital as something beyond a massive, expensive and now-empty acute care cathedral.

Because if algorithms replace doctors, will doctors (and patients) still need hospitals?   Read the whole thing.

7:19 AM

"I've Cracked It!"

Reportedly Steve Jobs' final words about Apple's long-rumored venture into the thickets of TV programming.  So has Apple, indeed, "cracked it?"  Let's hope so.

Analyst Shaw Wu on why Apple should enter the TV business: “What’s missing is live broadcast television,” he wrote. “One obvious way to offer this is via the traditional way where a user subscribes to cable or satellite. But a more revolutionary, disruptive and differentiated way, is via the internet or IPTV which would be more in-line with its iTunes and iCloud model. Because of the high dependence on content providers, we believe exact timing is difficult to pinpoint.”

He added, “We continue to hear what AAPL would love to do is offer users the ability to choose their own customized programming, i.e., whichever channels/shows they want for a monthly subscription fee. This is obviously much more complicated from a licensing standpoint. And in our view, would change the game for television and give AAPL a big leg-up against the competition.”  (Emphasis mine.)

Strategic separation of the magnitude Apple delivers is assembled from doing, not what others AREN'T doing, but doing what others CAN'T do.  The hard stuff.  The 'never been done before' risky stuff that nobody else has the fortitude or the imagination to tackle. 

Like the mobility to choose my own programming.  Whatever channels I want for a monthly fee.  No more surfing past the twenty channels I ignore to find the three I watch.  And maybe I can tell Siri  "NO MATTER WHAT THE CIRCUMSTANCES, DON'T EVER SHOW ME ALEX BALDWIN OR LADY GAGA!"

Like being the easiest hospital with which to do business, the no-hassle, no-BS hospital.  

Know anybody doing that?  Me neither. 

Is 2012 the year disaggregation and disruption (finally) come to TV?  Is it the year for cable providers' stodgy attitudes and crappy service to (finally) bite 'em in the ass?  Stay tuned (pun intended.)

6:54 AM

What I'm Reading: "Different; Escaping the Competitive Herd"

"...every year, I tell my students that marketing is the only function in the organization that is expressly designed to sit at the intersection where business meets people.  Real people.  And the problem with real people is that they don't see the world the same way a businessperson does.  They don't speak the language of bullet points; they don't organize the world into flowcharts and frameworks.  People, real people, view the world more organically.  They are idiosyncratic.  They are unpredictable.  They are beautifully disorganized."  

(From "Different; Escaping the Competitive Herd" by Youngme Moon.)

"...marketing is the only function in the organization that is expressly designed to sit at the intersection where business meets people."  I like that. 

(Image from http://layered.typepad.com/antidote_to_burnout/images/2007/10/06/4b14310b020017cf.gif found via a Creative Commons search)

9:41 AM

“He told them it was ugly and too complex..."

From The Daily News Blog: "Bio: Steve Jobs was a details man, even in his Memphis hospital bed."

"In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs that went on sale Monday, there’s some fascinating detail about Jobs’ stay in Memphis during 2009, when he got a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital’s transplant institute.

"Jobs, who died earlier this month at age 56, was ever the details man, even in his hospital bed.

"There’s a moment in the book’s recounting of Jobs’ transplant when Jobs pulled off an oxygen mask, grumbled about the design and ordered someone to bring him five different choices of masks. He said he’d pick the one he liked.

"Same for the oxygen monitor on his finger.

“He told them it was ugly and too complex,” Isaacson writes of the monitor. “He suggested ways it could be designed more simply.”

So here's a question for you:  before, during and maybe even after Jobs' hospital stay, how many hospital staffers saw those same devices - O2 masks, oxygen monitors, etc. - without spotting the obvious?  How many learned nothing, noticed nothing, simplified nothing? 

Here's another question: how many other opportunities like that are lying fallow in YOUR organization? 

Wanna bet the answer is an integer significantly above zero?  Dinner?  You're on!

(Connect with me on Twitter @whatifwhynot )

3:39 PM

Great PowerPoint Presentations: Oxymoronic?

No, but sometimes they can be rocket science as Edward Tufte shows in "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports." 

Tufte studied NASA's PowerPoint-fueled discussions as engineers struggled to assess the damage, if any, space shuttle Columbia sustained during a 2003 liftoff when a small piece of foam insulation broke off, striking the orbiter's left wing.  We all know how that story turned out.

Thankfully I'm called to deliver presentations with ideas, not lives, hanging in the balance. Still, telling a story clearly, concisely and powerfully never hurts.

6:19 AM

 Randy Lewis writing in the LA Times, discusses a little-known aspect of Steve Jobs' legacy: 

"Stevie Wonder said Thursday that he sought Jobs out late in his life to express his gratitude for matters that went well beyond what he and his company did for music.

"The one thing people aren't talking about is how he has made his technology accessible to the blind and the deaf and people who are quadriplegics and paraplegics," Wonder, 61, said. "He has affected not just my world, but the world of millions of people who without that technology would not be able to discover the world.

"His company was the first to come up with technology that made it accessible without screaming out loud 'This is for the blind; This is for the deaf.' He made it part of the actual unit itself. There was application inside the technology that allowed you to use it or not use it.

"The iPhone, iPad touch, iPod touch, all these things, even now the computer, are accessible to those who are with a physical disability," the 25-time Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter and instrumentalist said."

9:36 AM

Why The Next Steve Jobs Will Never Work For Your Hospital

Your hospital has thousands of employees, but could you use your very own version of Steve Jobs?  Probably, but don't kid yourself. He'd never get past your H-R department's first line of defense, with his attitude and his iconoclastic views and his wardrobe. Someone would scrawl "Weird and Possibly Dangerous" across his resume and that'd be that.

But don't fret.  I'm pretty sure the feeling would be mutual.  And that's why your hospital's branding tagline really ought to read "We're no worse than anybody else."

The NY Times' David Pogue on Steve Jobs: "Imitated, Never Duplicated:"

"Here’s a guy who never finished college, never went to business school, never worked for anyone else a day in his adult life. So how did he become the visionary who changed every business he touched? Actually, he’s given us clues all along. Remember the “Think Different” ad campaign he introduced upon his return to Apple in 1997?

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.”

"In other words, the story of Steve Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow.

"Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better, smarter or more beautiful, nothing else mattered. Not internal politics, not economic convention, not social graces.

[...]

"Suppose, by some miracle, that some kid in a garage somewhere at this moment possesses the marketing, invention, business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that that same person will be comfortable enough — or maybe uncomfortable enough — to swim upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision?

"Zero. The odds are zero."

Hospitals are dangerous places.  Lives hang in the balance and there's no place for freelancing.  But couldn't you use just ONE cranky visionary, just ONE person reminding everybody that going with the flow sometimes means you're in the sewer?  One lone voice holding mediocrity hostage, screaming "Dammit!  Life is too precious!  We can be BETTER!  Lead, follow or leave!"

"Zero.  The odds are zero."

Depressing.

And lest you think that Jobs' legacy offers no lessons for hospital leaders, consider this:  for all his innovative vision and creativity, his ability to distort reality in "insanely great" ways, Apple remains one of the planet's most disciplined and focused organizations.  Disciplined around process and philosophy.  Focused around doing a few things exceptionally well and NOT doing whatever detracts from those few things.

Those are lessons worthy of ANY organization.

1:25 PM

Doctors Learning to Speak "Iowan"

From Iowa Public Radio: Doctors Learning to Speak Iowan at Mercy Medical Center in Mason City, IA.

"Learning to speak English is one thing, learning to speak Iowan may be something else entirely. Iowa, especially in its more rural areas, has many foreign-born physicians practicing in clinics and hospitals. On today's program, we’ll find out about an innovative program in Mason City that helps doctors understand our state with courses like "Topics for Small Talk with Iowans." We'll talk to the teachers in the program at Mercy Medical Center North Iowa, Univ. of Northern Iowa professors Mark Grey and Michele Devlin. We'll also hear from the man who devised the program, Dr. David Little, and Family Medicine Residents Dr. Sreevalli Dega and Dr. Anileen Prabhakaran."

10:22 AM

What's On Your 'Unlearn' List?

Could you redesign a $300,000 house and build it for, say, 20 percent less?  Probably.  Easy, actually.  Just downsize some square footage, cheapen the finishes, toss overboard the granite and the tray ceilings and you're there.

What if I asked you for well-designed, safe, affordable shelter for the world's poor?  Oh yeah, shelter costing $300 to build?  That's right, $300.  Not $300,000.  Not $30,000.  Not $3,000.  Three measly hundred dollars.

Could you do THAT?  This team did.  And created a movement along the way, with a growing list of advisors, a website and corporate sponsors.  

No incrementalism here.  No "we'll start with the status quo and make it a little better."

We all know 'stuff' that's useful when the pace of change is comfortable and incremental.  Unfortunately, that 'stuff'  becomes blinders to be unlearned and forgotten when change of the $300 House magnitude is necessary.  Unlearning and a willingness to stand apart from the comfortable herd spouting 'We're no worse than anybody else.'

What would you have to unlearn to deliver an episode of care for, say, fifty percent less than today?  You better figure it out before the marketplace does, or you'll be living in one of those $300 houses.  Actually, it may not be that bad.

[Read the Harvard Business Review article...]

3:55 PM

"Different" by Youngme Moon

From Amazon.com:  If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it’s the absolute importance of “competing like crazy.” Youngme Moon’s message is simply “Get off this treadmill that’s taking you nowhere. Going tit for tat and adding features, augmentations, and gimmicks to beat the competition has the perverse result of making you like everyone else.”

"Different" provides a highly original perspective on what it means to offer something that is meaningfully different—different in a manner that is both fundamental and comprehensive.

To learn about differences, compare Yahoo! to Google.  To learn about conventional wisdom and gimmickry, compare Hospital A to Hospitals B, C and D.

Looks like a good addition to my 'to read' list.  Just remember, you heard it all here first.

9:54 AM

"I Have An Idea..."

How many great ideas started with "I have an idea..."?  (4 words.)

 Or "What if..?"  (Two words.)

Or "Why not..?"  (Two more.)

If you are an average-sized hospital, you have, maybe, 2,000 people working in your organization? Think there might be, say, 10 great ideas in there somewhere?  10 new, paradigm-busting, customer-delighting game changers?

2,000 people, ten great ideas, two words.  2,000/10+2

It's not exactly Pythagoras as math formulas go.  But before you question the power of new ideas, here's a headline for you: "Online gamers (i.e. scientific novices) crack AIDS enzyme puzzle."

"Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade."

Kids, thinking differently, solving problems.  It's not that the ideas aren't out there, waiting.  They are.

"What if..?"

Leave a comment about how your organization is cultivating the next generation of game-changing ideas. Where do you find them? Nurture them? Reward them? Thanks!

5:31 PM

Hospitals Need A Steve Jobs.

"Again and again, Steve Jobs would step up to entrenched players in media and explain their business to them in ways they didn’t recognize from the inside."

3:00 PM