Putting Patient Engagement To Work, No. 3

The budding patient engagement "movement" is mainly about improving clinical and economical outcomes. It's about quality and efficiency, being more effective. D' you s'pose our leading management thinkers and practitioners might have a worthwhile thing or two to add along those lines?

I do. 

In the sub-sections below, I want to touch on one management process and another practice that I find germane to the subject. I'll describe some of the work being done around each, who's doing it, the tools and techniques they're using, etc.

Voice of the customer (VOC) (#notVolatileOrganicCompound)

The customer is king. And the "fact" -- debatable -- that he's always right (in reference to the famous Marshall Field quote) has been the case for as long as I can remember.

Recent studies are backing this up. From IBM's The Customer-activated Enterprise, for example, "Outperforming organizations are much more likely than underperforming ones to be collaborating with customers." Plus, "We found that companies that are receptive to customer input tend to have longer and more profitable relationships with their customers than companies that keep customers at arm's length."

Two companies that stand out in my mind for being ahead of the curve are Toyota (with its Toyota Way) and Procter & Gamble. Both have long "known it in their bones" that contexts matter. You simply can't do a great job of satisfying customers without partnering with them, and without absorbing and incorporating their very particular, i.e., local, knowledge. 

Now other companies, in their efforts to catch up, are looking to their own customers for feedback and insight. They're commissioning Chief Customer Officers*. And they're leaning for help on management consultancies that specialize in things like VOC.

VOC -- voice of the customer -- is a term used in business to describe the in-depth process of capturing a customer's preferences, expectations and aversions. I think of it as nearly synonymous (a near-o-nym? an almost-o-nym?) with patient engagement.

Vision Critical is one such consultancy. It specializes in building and supporting cloud-based customer intelligence platforms -- insight communities -- that provide companies with ways to deeply engage their customers. The goal in every case is to deliver meaningful insights that companies can use to make better decisions. Companies...

And other organization-types, as well. Nonprofits in the healthcare arena, for example, are using insight communities to understand and develop new patient journeys, explore and obtain feedback on new treatments, and more. Take Cleveland Clinic: it's been using one to listen to its patients. And reaping the rewards. Its "Patient Panel" has helped the Clinic improve internally in areas from marketing to operations to HR. Check out Do better for your customers: 5 business lessons from patient communities for more.

Delegation

Patient engagement = getting things done through other people = delegating

If you've been following along and clicking through my links, you know about PCORI’s, Boston Children's', and Cleveland Clinic's conceptions of the kinds of things that are delegable to patient partners. There are a lot o' things, aren't there? So many, in fact, that one might begin to wonder what's not potentially delegable. (Isn't every thing on every employee's to-do list at least a candidate? I mean, once someone commits to completing a task, he or she has three options: do it right away, do it later, or delegate it to someone else...) 

Alison Green and Jerry Hauser, authors of Managing to Change the World (2009), believe it's a nonprofit leader's duty to delegate. "If you can delegate it, you should delegate it, ” they write. Delegating should enable you to make the most of your limited** human resources and thereby maximize the effectiveness of your organization in pursuing its mission. 

Stop for a second. How many nonprofit leaders, for the sake of the mission, try to hand off every task they can? How many equate patient engagement with delegation?

When you delegate well, you put people in positions to do what they're dramatically well-suited to do. But it doesn't just happen. To the contrary, there are practices to be practiced, step-by-steps to follow. Green and Hauser offer easy-to-implement tools, for example, for determining what to delegate, assigning roles and responsibilities, and successfully guiding off-loaded work to completion. Bain and Company (one of Earth’s largest and oldest consultancies; Consultasaurus rex?) has compelling things to say about the decision making that goes into delegating. (“One key to successful delegation is to coach team members on making and executing critical decisions.” See How to be a Better Boss)

The bottom line here? 

Those who would engage patients should learn the ABCs of delegating from the ABCs -- thanks for the acronym to David K. Hurst, one of the “C”s -- of management: Academics, Business people, and Consultants.

*  *  *  *  *

Now, generalizing and summarizing:

There’s no need to completely reinvent the wheel if you’re an executive in the healthcare world who's considering a patient engagement initiative. You can look to what’s working in the business world…and apply liberally. I know in the cerebral palsy (CP) /neurological disorders arena we’re not drawing upon that knowledge nearly as much as we could. 

*Essentially, the CCO is expected to form deep personal relationships with the company’s customers to truly understand them. 

**I’ll call into question how limited those human resources really are later.