Karen-Claire Voss is a voice I've just discovered by courtesy of Shelley Mitchell. I've written of Shelley in an earlier blog - she is the founder of The Actors Center of San Francisco and gained fame and kudos for her one woman performance of Talking with Angels. Shelley embodies the roots of acting as the act of communication between human beings. Her performance of Talking with Angels showcases what acting can be at its very best: communicating via heart, body and soul.
We have so much to learn from this meaning of the craft of acting.
Contrast that to the term "Customer intimacy" as its used in business today.
Can we really take that to mean that a business is really committed to developing authentic meaningful relationships with their customers?
Acting has suffered from the same deterioration in meaning.
From a supreme act of communication, acting now conjures up images of "faking it" "emotional manipulation"
We in business must be careful when we use terms like customer intimacy that there is genuine intent and real operational heft supporting such a claim.
'Ware! A customer tricked is a customer lost.
Now, back to Karen-Claire Voss who speaks wisely from Istanbul, Turkey having survived the wilds of Berkeley "methodolatory". She calls us to action to search for a world of joy and adventure; She sees the university as a space of possibility: (I have interjected spacing and bolding on her original words found at the link above)
"All thinking men and women,
whether directly involved with education or not,
need to make a conscious effort
to rediscover the vision of education
as a process characterized
not only by rigor, but by wonder;
not only by closing, but by opening.
Far from being a romantic, irrelevant fantasy,
this vision is critically important.
Without it, all of us inevitably lose sight of what real education means.
....developing countries like Turkey, Rumania, and the former Soviet Union....particularly (poignantly, painfully)
susceptible to being seduced by an image of education
as the mere acquisition of technical skills of one sort or another
...thinking of the gathering, classification and organization of data
as being the same as .... the seeking of wisdom
....the mere fact of complexity as being the same as quality"
For more on Karen-Claire Voss see http://istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/index.html
For more on Shelley Mitchell see http://www.shelleymitchell.org/
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Putting the Patient in the Picture
I've been writing for CRMGuru since 1998 when it was called CRMTalk, a wonderful community emerged out of that interchange and grew into the Guru thing. My involvement with CRMGuru has been very valuable in teaching me to write and communicate better. This article just came out today - I had interviewed Joel Berman right after he was the star of the Health Information Management Systems Society Conference 2006 in San Diego. He showed us all what was possible in medicine when technology is applied right. I felt the lessons shown there deserved a wider audience outside of the healthcare world and wrote about it for CRMGuru. The full article is posted below. Many thanks to Gwynne Young Managing Editor at CRMGuru.com for great work in slimming it down while bulking up the muscle in content and value. I hope you'll agree! If you do, or if you don't - let me know! It's you I write for!
Nov. 13, 2006
Advances in Customer Management in Health Put the Patient in the Picture
By Mei Lin Fung, www.CIEInstitute.com
Mary Howard (not her real name), 75 years old, went to see her doctor, Joel Berman, M.D. Howard had a case of the shingles, and Berman offered the standard treatment, antiviral and steroid medicines. As Berman related to me in February 2006, after his presentation at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society Conference in San Diego, California, his patient then told him, "I had a very bad reaction to the steroid last time. I couldn't sleep, and it made me very nervous. How important is it?"
Together, they looked it up on the computer. Through instant, side-by-side use of information technology, Berman reinforced patient responsibility for her health. He supported Howard, and together after considering several with their differing effects, chose a medicine that did not include steroids. With a sense of control over her destiny, Howard took the prescribed course of treatment, and the shingles subsided without the nervousness surfacing even once.
Together, doctor and patient are using IT to achieve her well-being to the best of their joint knowledge.
Berman, the doctor in this case, is a leading pioneer in the enlightened use of electronic health records in health service delivery. He practices at Capital Region Healthcare, which serves 125,000 people living around Concord, New Hampshire.
We're entering a new era of health, with more and more medical practitioners adopting the use of electronic health records, under a timeline mandated by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. Although there is no deadline, the agency is indicating that Medicare payments will be linked to conversion to an electronic system.
A sea of forms
Before fall of 2000, when his office moved to Electronic Medical Records to maintain digital records for the history of patients' visits, vital signs records, medications, immunizations and laboratory reports, Berman told me he "was drowning in a paper world."
"In 1998-'99, I couldn't find charts. X-rays [were] misfiled. I had to come in early every day just to find the charts and proper paperwork for the patients I was scheduled to meet that day," he said.
The most sophisticated EMRs even track the health outcomes and the evidence for decisions made.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Berman told me he 'was drowning in a paper world.'’
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Capital Region Healthcare gradually built 700 electronic forms on seven different servers that had no enterprise-wide coordination and were often duplicative and inefficient. In 2003, Berman's office first began to cull and consolidate the forms, to create a limited number of standardized "smart forms" with built-in decision support.
Berman became a champion of using technology to accelerate patient health improvement and simultaneously improve the well-being of doctors and nurses. In the process, he learned the value of capturing data in a structured way. As he said, "The real power is in its application as a database. ... You can't just put it in as text. We must put it in the right field, so that later one can find [for instance] what percentage of diabetics have foot problems."
What Berman found is that the EMR application offered prompts and reports to doctors that supported the doctor-patient relationship. Data was input in a manner that increased the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. The vision of health service delivery extended well beyond EMR, vitally incorporating key measures of patient health improvement.
Berman worked with Capital Region to re-design the EMR to organize the prompts so that they supported, rather than interfered with, the doctor-patient relationship. It was only after the other doctors could see that IT was helping them that they put effort into inputting data, which, being structured, could later be analyzed to help tie outcomes to patterns of intervention.
Berman has shown that EMR can be patient-centric and can support health practitioners like himself who say, in Berman's words, that "the real art of medicine is in the conversations we have with our patients" (from Silo Practice to Collaborative Care, a slide show by Joel Berman, available at http://www.emr.msu.edu/Documents/chug_2005_fall/pdf/berman_silo_practice_to_collab_care.pdf).
Berman's presentation at that 2006 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society Conference was a revelation to the large crowd who came to hear it. Afterward, the questions from listeners were full of praise and intent on understanding how he had pulled off the incredible task of having the physicians lead the way back to patient-centered healthcare.
Representatives from Medicare indicated interest in collaborating to spread the success of his approach more widely.
Common metrics
The group practice agreed on common metrics for all physicians, which Berman said really motivated people when colleagues found others doing a better job than them. The EMR was not just a repository; 60 physicians and nurse practitioners were measured by it and responsible for the quality of data to maintain integrity of the database. Those healthcare professionals had to, in Berman's words, "learn the proper ways to enter data into the EMR." As he said, "No one wants a bad report."
It was Berman's key insight to tie the EMR implementation to the national Diabetes Physician Recognition Program (DPRP). The connection was critical to the success of the implementation. The goal was to improve patient health and improved doctor and nurse well-being. EMR was just one of the tools to achieve that goal. Data from the EMR enabled practitioners to have a feedback loop tying outcomes to actions, which, in turn, lead to a series of corrective steps, resulting in accelerating health improvements in patients.
The strategy resulted, in the roughly two years between November 2003 and September 2005, in steep improvements in nine of the 10 metrics of DPRP. Capital Region was able to pull ahead of other physician groups in providing high quality care that supported patient responsibility for their health.
Capital Region was recognized by Diabetes Physician Recognition Program as providing higher quality care than other physician groups. That recognition meant that more doctors referred their patients to Capital Region. Not content with winning kudos in diabetes care, Capital Region is now going after recognition in the cardiac area. In February 2005, Berman's group adopted the NCQA's Heart Stroke Recognition Program as the next enterprise-wide quality initiative.
Capital Region is not alone. Information technology is improving doctor-patient relationships—and patient health.
The Department of Veterans' Affairs, for instance, is adopting a new computer program to help patients make more informed decisions about their care. The Electronic Support for Patient Decisions initiative uses customized software to provide patients with information about treatment options and standardized procedures among clinicians. The program takes physicians through the informed consent process step by step, displays educational materials about risks and benefits of procedures, generates and stores consent forms, and imports information from patient records.
It is clear that IT is leading to a new relationship between doctors and their patients in becoming partners in managing the health of the patient and improving healthcare and healthcare costs.
Technology has, Berman said, "profoundly altered the nature of my relationship with my patients in a good way. It's changed my role from know-it-all authority figure to one in which I'm a collaborator with my patients, an advisor, a coach and a guide."
Mei Lin Fung is Chief Architect of www.CIEinstitute.com, the Customer Innovation Excellence Institute, and director of www.TalkTimeAsia.com She is an expert on Customer Lifetime Value. Her focus is in creating high value and earning customer trust through highly valued customer experiences. She was an early pioneer in CRM, working with both Tom Siebel and Marc Benioff at the start of the industry. She was managing director at Wainscott Ventures, a venture capital firm with offices in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Silicon Valley. In April 2005, Fung was appointed as overseas consultant to the Contact Center and CRM Committee of the Ministry of Information Industry in China. With Lee Pui Mun Ph.D in Singapore Institute of Management, Baumin Lee, Ph.D at 95Teleweb, Beijing and Casey McNeal Ph.D., at The CIE Institute, Fung is developing Customer Innovation Excellence Certification standards and curriculum in conjunction with Oklahoma State University.
Copyright 1998-2006 CustomerThink Corporation and CRMGuru.com. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinting CRMGuru articles is generally permitted, provided you follow the CRMGuru Reprint Guidelines.
Nov. 13, 2006
Advances in Customer Management in Health Put the Patient in the Picture
By Mei Lin Fung, www.CIEInstitute.com
Mary Howard (not her real name), 75 years old, went to see her doctor, Joel Berman, M.D. Howard had a case of the shingles, and Berman offered the standard treatment, antiviral and steroid medicines. As Berman related to me in February 2006, after his presentation at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society Conference in San Diego, California, his patient then told him, "I had a very bad reaction to the steroid last time. I couldn't sleep, and it made me very nervous. How important is it?"
Together, they looked it up on the computer. Through instant, side-by-side use of information technology, Berman reinforced patient responsibility for her health. He supported Howard, and together after considering several with their differing effects, chose a medicine that did not include steroids. With a sense of control over her destiny, Howard took the prescribed course of treatment, and the shingles subsided without the nervousness surfacing even once.
Together, doctor and patient are using IT to achieve her well-being to the best of their joint knowledge.
Berman, the doctor in this case, is a leading pioneer in the enlightened use of electronic health records in health service delivery. He practices at Capital Region Healthcare, which serves 125,000 people living around Concord, New Hampshire.
We're entering a new era of health, with more and more medical practitioners adopting the use of electronic health records, under a timeline mandated by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. Although there is no deadline, the agency is indicating that Medicare payments will be linked to conversion to an electronic system.
A sea of forms
Before fall of 2000, when his office moved to Electronic Medical Records to maintain digital records for the history of patients' visits, vital signs records, medications, immunizations and laboratory reports, Berman told me he "was drowning in a paper world."
"In 1998-'99, I couldn't find charts. X-rays [were] misfiled. I had to come in early every day just to find the charts and proper paperwork for the patients I was scheduled to meet that day," he said.
The most sophisticated EMRs even track the health outcomes and the evidence for decisions made.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Berman told me he 'was drowning in a paper world.'’
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Capital Region Healthcare gradually built 700 electronic forms on seven different servers that had no enterprise-wide coordination and were often duplicative and inefficient. In 2003, Berman's office first began to cull and consolidate the forms, to create a limited number of standardized "smart forms" with built-in decision support.
Berman became a champion of using technology to accelerate patient health improvement and simultaneously improve the well-being of doctors and nurses. In the process, he learned the value of capturing data in a structured way. As he said, "The real power is in its application as a database. ... You can't just put it in as text. We must put it in the right field, so that later one can find [for instance] what percentage of diabetics have foot problems."
What Berman found is that the EMR application offered prompts and reports to doctors that supported the doctor-patient relationship. Data was input in a manner that increased the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. The vision of health service delivery extended well beyond EMR, vitally incorporating key measures of patient health improvement.
Berman worked with Capital Region to re-design the EMR to organize the prompts so that they supported, rather than interfered with, the doctor-patient relationship. It was only after the other doctors could see that IT was helping them that they put effort into inputting data, which, being structured, could later be analyzed to help tie outcomes to patterns of intervention.
Berman has shown that EMR can be patient-centric and can support health practitioners like himself who say, in Berman's words, that "the real art of medicine is in the conversations we have with our patients" (from Silo Practice to Collaborative Care, a slide show by Joel Berman, available at http://www.emr.msu.edu/Documents/chug_2005_fall/pdf/berman_silo_practice_to_collab_care.pdf).
Berman's presentation at that 2006 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society Conference was a revelation to the large crowd who came to hear it. Afterward, the questions from listeners were full of praise and intent on understanding how he had pulled off the incredible task of having the physicians lead the way back to patient-centered healthcare.
Representatives from Medicare indicated interest in collaborating to spread the success of his approach more widely.
Common metrics
The group practice agreed on common metrics for all physicians, which Berman said really motivated people when colleagues found others doing a better job than them. The EMR was not just a repository; 60 physicians and nurse practitioners were measured by it and responsible for the quality of data to maintain integrity of the database. Those healthcare professionals had to, in Berman's words, "learn the proper ways to enter data into the EMR." As he said, "No one wants a bad report."
It was Berman's key insight to tie the EMR implementation to the national Diabetes Physician Recognition Program (DPRP). The connection was critical to the success of the implementation. The goal was to improve patient health and improved doctor and nurse well-being. EMR was just one of the tools to achieve that goal. Data from the EMR enabled practitioners to have a feedback loop tying outcomes to actions, which, in turn, lead to a series of corrective steps, resulting in accelerating health improvements in patients.
The strategy resulted, in the roughly two years between November 2003 and September 2005, in steep improvements in nine of the 10 metrics of DPRP. Capital Region was able to pull ahead of other physician groups in providing high quality care that supported patient responsibility for their health.
Capital Region was recognized by Diabetes Physician Recognition Program as providing higher quality care than other physician groups. That recognition meant that more doctors referred their patients to Capital Region. Not content with winning kudos in diabetes care, Capital Region is now going after recognition in the cardiac area. In February 2005, Berman's group adopted the NCQA's Heart Stroke Recognition Program as the next enterprise-wide quality initiative.
Capital Region is not alone. Information technology is improving doctor-patient relationships—and patient health.
The Department of Veterans' Affairs, for instance, is adopting a new computer program to help patients make more informed decisions about their care. The Electronic Support for Patient Decisions initiative uses customized software to provide patients with information about treatment options and standardized procedures among clinicians. The program takes physicians through the informed consent process step by step, displays educational materials about risks and benefits of procedures, generates and stores consent forms, and imports information from patient records.
It is clear that IT is leading to a new relationship between doctors and their patients in becoming partners in managing the health of the patient and improving healthcare and healthcare costs.
Technology has, Berman said, "profoundly altered the nature of my relationship with my patients in a good way. It's changed my role from know-it-all authority figure to one in which I'm a collaborator with my patients, an advisor, a coach and a guide."
Mei Lin Fung is Chief Architect of www.CIEinstitute.com, the Customer Innovation Excellence Institute, and director of www.TalkTimeAsia.com She is an expert on Customer Lifetime Value. Her focus is in creating high value and earning customer trust through highly valued customer experiences. She was an early pioneer in CRM, working with both Tom Siebel and Marc Benioff at the start of the industry. She was managing director at Wainscott Ventures, a venture capital firm with offices in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Silicon Valley. In April 2005, Fung was appointed as overseas consultant to the Contact Center and CRM Committee of the Ministry of Information Industry in China. With Lee Pui Mun Ph.D in Singapore Institute of Management, Baumin Lee, Ph.D at 95Teleweb, Beijing and Casey McNeal Ph.D., at The CIE Institute, Fung is developing Customer Innovation Excellence Certification standards and curriculum in conjunction with Oklahoma State University.
Copyright 1998-2006 CustomerThink Corporation and CRMGuru.com. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinting CRMGuru articles is generally permitted, provided you follow the CRMGuru Reprint Guidelines.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Our Greatest Fear
I attended an event on Wednesday Nov 2, organized by WCAN (We Can) Women of Color Action Network, invited by Linda Parker Pennington who was moderating a panel which included Ted Marsh - a wise man who I was very pleased to meet!
He has his own 14 levels of relationships and we look forward to seeing how we might collaborate.
He shared a poem with us - which I thought was wonderful and so I'm sharing it with you
Our Greatest Fear
by Marianne Williamson from her book “A Return to Love”
Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
Do not commit the sin of omission: Let your own light shine!
May I let my own light shine!
He has his own 14 levels of relationships and we look forward to seeing how we might collaborate.
He shared a poem with us - which I thought was wonderful and so I'm sharing it with you
Our Greatest Fear
by Marianne Williamson from her book “A Return to Love”
Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
Do not commit the sin of omission: Let your own light shine!
May I let my own light shine!
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