Culture club

As Baby Boomers and Generation Xers enter and approach, respectively, the Medicare realm, their journeys’ wake ushers in a phenomenon that these two generations of healthcare professionals only poked, prodded and quixotically dismissed as quaint.

Focusing on the prices (costs), processes and products (stuff) while paying politically correct lip service to the patients — or more accurately and collectively, the people — represented financial and operational legerdemain to what the next generation really values.

What do the Gen Yers, Gen Zers or Millennials really value? People, which are part of culture and experience. And that choice often grates against historical and traditional business processes, depending on industry.

During the SMI Fall Forum in Chicago, much of the buzz centered on how corporate mergers and acquisitions and new and emerging technologies continue to “disrupt” the status quo of healthcare “business.” Clinical disruptions that benefit patients may be fine but financial and operational disruptions can be tough to swallow unless you can be convincingly persuasive that they benefit patients, leading to good publicity and generating more business.

But “culture” and “experience” both represent this warm-and-fuzzy, touchy-feely stuff that really can’t be itemized and quantified on a balance sheet or in a budget. At least, that is, until CMA decided to hinge Medicare reimbursement dollars on patient satisfaction scores calculated from emotionally subjective surveys of sensitive people easily annoyed.

Disney bends over backwards to care for and love its customers so that they tell others and return themselves to spend more money. Why can’t Healthcare Inc. be more like Disney? Of course, the key differences are that people actually want to go to Disney and spend their own money on overpriced food and beverages and wearable mouse ears. Few, if any, actually want to go to a hospital as someone else nitpicks about paying the bills for overpriced products and services and wearable sensors. And you’re more likely to contract an infection at a hospital than at an amusement park.

M&A and new tech may achieve several things worth noting: They reveal and illuminate process and workflow redundancies, add actual short-term costs offset by promised long-term gains and can bring out the best and worst in people. That third part of the equation points to some of the perceived challenges of consumer-directed healthcare.

Unhappy clinicians and administrators generally translate into unhappy patients that may take longer to heal, which translates into higher costs for healthcare services. Unfortunately, hospitals can’t rigidly require their clinical and administrative “characters” to play nice with the overly demanding “guests” no matter their personal or professional anxieties. Disney’s cast of anthropomorphic and fairytale human characters don’t enjoy such flexibility.

Some say the older professionals are too set in their ways and refuse to change. However, they’re facing off with younger professionals who expect, welcome and demand change — particularly if it benefits them.

Case in point: One healthcare executive at the Forum shared with an amused crowd how she favored one famous pizza product over another famous pizza product based on taste but ordered the less tasty pizza product more frequently because she enjoyed using that company’s online app. The app experience was pleasing so that pizza chain earned her business. If this isn’t a revelation about an emerging revolution than we haven’t evolved enough as an industry.

Cynics may dismiss this developing trend as drivel even as they play games and take photos with their mobile phones or check their vital signs and talk to colleagues through their wristwatches. Perhaps Dick Tracy’s Diet Smith should be running Healthcare Inc.

Does this mean that the younger generation will accept mediocre or inferior products just so they can enjoy visually tracking when the product travels from manufacturer to distributor to provider loading dock? Don’t be silly; of course not.

This means that culture and experience represent the newest layers added to a process where efficiency and logic will find it difficult to penetrate.