The Backstory

January 1 rolled around and election season kicked off. Ok, it was already well under way. But with the new year things are ratcheting up and the first primaries are just a couple of months away. With the increased scrutiny being placed on hospitals in general, and the many different political approaches to healthcare among the candidates in this cycle, how should healthcare leaders prepare and respond? Our CEO, David Jarrard, has some thoughts.

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Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper showing that hospital mergers don't do much to change several key metrics in quality and experience. And in the one place where the numbers do change - patient experience - they're worse. Under normal circumstances a paper showing little to no change in the key outcomes studied wouldn't get much attention. The problem here is that hospitals have long touted these metrics as reasons for a merger. It's more about the unfulfilled expectations - set by hospitals themselves - that made it a story. Here, our CEO, David Jarrard, explains what's going on and what healthcare leaders can do to make sure it doesn't happen in the future.

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Do you know your local FBI agent? You should.

John Mason is SVP and CIO at Quorum Health. He joined Reed Smith, our VP of Digital, here at the office to talk about healthcare cybersecurity. In this conversation, John and Reed discuss:

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Jarrard Inc. has had the great privilege of working with Faith Family Medical Center for the past couple of years.

They are a community clinic with a mission to provide the residents of greater Nashville who are uninsured or underinsured with affordable, quality primary medical care. While the numbers don’t come close to describing the impact of their work on people from across middle Tennessee, you can get a sense of how significant it is in the fact that they provide around eight million dollars worth of care each year on a two million dollar budget.

We spoke with Dr. Parker Panovec, Faith Family’s chief medical officer, and CEO Laura Hobson to get a better understanding of how they use listening and storytelling to provide outstanding care to the Nashville community. Simply put, they don’t have the resources to be anything but efficient, which means the entire team is dialed in to their mission and to the needs of both the community and individual patients.

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The end of life can teach us a lot about leading in high-stakes situations.

Dr. Michael Fratkin was a burned-out palliative care physician in an under-resourced clinical setting. Fed up with the way things were going, he “had enough crazy or coffee” in him five years ago to step out of the typical healthcare box and build something new. The result was Resolution Care Network, a palliative care organization that seeks to bring “capable and compassionate care to everyone, everywhere in the face of serious illness.”

Fratkin’s job as a clinician can only be successfully accomplished through carefully listening to and understanding who his patients are, what they want out of life, where the gaps or challenges have been in the past and then creating a plan with them that takes into account both their personal and medical situations. He’s helping people make decisions at perhaps the most vulnerable time of their life, helping them live as well as possible during their remaining days.

In addition, as the leader of a healthcare organization designed to carry out a profound mission on a shoestring budget, Fratkin has had to build and maintain a team united on common goals. Here are some of his insights on listening and stories that apply to any healthcare leader.

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Who knew a whiteboard cartoon character could change a hundred-year old organization… and the way people think about population health?

Through both careful listening and clever storytelling, St. Luke’s Health System, an eight hospital, 200-clinic healthcare system based in Boise, Idaho, figured it out. And a simple solution is moving the health of an entire community.

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When Dr. David Pate retires at the end of January 2020, he will have led St. Luke’s Health System for a decade.

During that time, the organization has undergone radical change and plenty of garden-variety change. Like any healthcare executive, Pate has been in the middle of constant evolution, making hard decisions on how to transform the organization and position it for a future built on value and patient-centered care.

Today, he attributes St. Luke’s success to excellent collaboration among health system leadership and a willingness – by all stakeholders and at all levels – to listen. In addition, Pate individually and the organization as a whole have realized the value of distilling complex messages into stories to promote buy-in and create further collaboration. It’s a virtuous cycle.

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Last week, several hospital groups filed lawsuits against HHS around the agency’s rule stating that payers and providers must reveal their negotiated rates. That rule was designed as part of the current administration’s push for price transparency. There’s been lots of excellent discussion about the lawsuits, and whether HHS even has the authority to create a rule forcing transparency around private negotiations.

But the real issue isn’t CMS/HHS. It’s consumers. The bottom line? Patients don’t want to know hospital prices. They want to know how much it will cost them. If people know what’s medical care is going to cost them ahead of time, they’re more likely to pay.

Even if the government's efforts to impose price transparency are unsuccessful, the core issue won’t go away. Consumers are not going to let it. So, however the legal situation plays out, hospitals and health systems shouldn't just sit by and wait until the dust settles. Here’s what Kim Fox, Partner and Regional Practice Lead at Jarrard Inc, says they can do today.

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This idea that healthcare is doing digital marketing is absurd.

Hospitals and health systems are just doing marketing. The execution may be digital, it may be traditional. And the weight of one or the other will be based on whom you’re trying to communicate with and your goals and resources. But it’s all just marketing.

It’s not that we shouldn’t have subject matter expertise within a hospital marcom department. But we’ve talked too much about digital versus traditional. We should focus on what we’re doing – trying to communicate in the most effective way to protect our audience and our patients– rather than making too big of a deal about how we’re doing it.

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Worrying about what people outside your hospital or health system think about you is important. Just as important? Ensuring your staff, clinicians and hospital leadership are on the same page. Done right, strong internal communications and message training will build a group of powerful advocates for your healthcare organization. Done wrong, they'll either be passive bystanders or - worse - devastating detractors. Make sure you have a clear and ongoing focus on internal communications and message training

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