I can remember the conversation like it was yesterday.
We were all sitting in my in-laws’ backyard about four years ago having a BBQ. As everyone enjoyed themselves, Marie’s father, my Dad and I were talking about the joys and responsibilities of homeownership, as we were just about to close on our house.
“Oh, you’ll get handy,” they said. “You just wind up having to. You can’t call people to come and fix every little thing.”
“Eh,” I said dismissively. “I don’t know how to fix anything, and I’m not handy. I’ll just focus on making money so I can hire people to do all those little things.”
Looking back, I can see how right they were. You simply cannot call people for everything; for the silly little things, folks won’t even come out. Plus, I firmly believe plumbers, electricians and other trades folks charge an “I can’t believe you had me come out for this” premium for the truly foolish jobs.
“How did you stop the leak?” you ask.
“I just tightened it,” the plumber replies, unable to make eye contact for fear of laughing.
“Is that a technical term?” you mutter.
In much the same way, when I started a business, I never really thought about the responsibilities of being a businessman, of running a business — not just interviewing people and writing columns, the things I’d been doing all my career. But, just like learning to deal with a house, I’ve learned to deal with a business.
And dealing with a business means being as profitable as one can reasonably be. When one starts into this line, all the focus is on revenue, creating and improving products and selling them to as many folks as one reasonably can. But it seems that when one hits a certain level of maturity, the focus on top line shifts to a look at expenses, for spending $1,000 less is every bit as good as reaping $1,000 more.
Armed with this new maturity, I took a look at our expenses and found that some of the work we’d been outsourcing when I was, for example, on my own in January 2010, could be brought in house now that we were a team of three.
First off, I did some research. What would it take to do the outsourced work in-house? Do we have the expertise, could we learn it? Do we have the bandwidth, could we find it? After determining that the learning curve was manageable, I asked both Nancy and Kate to take on things that had been done by vendors.
As usual, they did not disappoint. They were both willing to listen, to consider, and to give it a shot. But perhaps most interestingly, both focused on a particular upside I had not thought of as a cardinal selling point. Rather than saying, “Oh, now I have to do it!” They both said, “That will be great, now I get to do it.”
And why were they happy? Because now they don’t have to wait. In their reactions, I realized that smart, hardworking and efficient folks LOVE to be empowered, to be able to do the things that help them move things along. They HATE long turnaround times and they dislike waiting on others.
This reminded me of some of the things our CIO presenters have said in recent Webinars around big data and predictive analytics — that the key to making big data a reality is empowering clinicians and other employees to initiate the queries themselves, and this means a user-friendly interface. Without it, you’ll have tons of requests for data coming into IT, and that’s a recipe for going nowhere.
And, “Hey vendors, without it, you don’t have a saleable product.”
One CIO told me a story of a vendor touting their “executive dashboard.” After perusing the product and determining it to be utterly unfriendly, he replied, “Unfortunately, no executive I know would ever use this dashboard.”
Patient portals, patient engagement, self-service big data queries — it all constitutes the future of healthcare, and done right, it is a good future for you. It is a future where IT helps create the tools and the users are then off and running. It’s a future where the barrier of usability is the only one that must be surmounted to unleash everyone’s desire for self-service and, thus, change everything.
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