Tag: care

How Much Do Leaders Care?

~ MD Harris Institute ~ Leave a comment

It is true that no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care

  • A husband and father earns the right to lead his family by caring for his wife and children.
  • A minister earns the right to preach by caring for his congregation.
  • A physician earns the right to teach medical students and residents by caring for them, and the right to influence and even direct his patients by caring for them.
  • A commander earns the right to command by caring for his soldiers.
  • A manager earns the right to lead by caring for his employees.
  • A teacher earns the right to teach by caring for his students.
  • A king earns the right to rule and a prime minister or president earns the right to preside (exercise authority or control) by caring for his citizens.

Caring is not merely feeling benevolent emotions.  Actually, since emotions are merely a side effect of thoughts and actions, benevolent emotions are an outgrowth, not a cause or a definition, or caring.  Leaders who care do the following for those who follow them:

  • Learn about them
  • Pray for them
  • Encourage them
  • Talk to them
  • Listen to them
  • Rebuke them
  • Mentor them
  • Teach them
  • Be accountable to them

Discovery and Innovation in the Business of Health Care

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How can you do something that you have never done, or discover something that no one has ever known? Read below for some help. 

Discovering things previously unknown is one of the most important, and most enjoyable, things that anyone can do. Most people do it every day, whether as simple as finding a new restaurant they love or discovering a new comet in the heavens. Fundamentally, new discoveries come from observation, analysis, and experimentation. A husband looking for a new restaurant to try with his wife might observe something that in his experience resembles a restaurant on a street corner. He then analyzes the available information to decide if he wants to try it; what kind of food they, the opening hours, and whether it is clean and inviting. Finally he and his wife try it out, completing the process of discovery.

New discoveries are often far more difficult than finding a great new place to eat. Identifying a new comet can require expensive equipment and uncommon expertise, while sequencing the human genome, learning about subatomic particles or curing cancer are some of the slowest and most resource intensive discoveries of all. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer followed the same observation-analysis-experimentation sequence. In the 1930s a few surgeons noticed that they seemed to be performing lung cancer surgeries on a lot of smokers. Some published their observations and that induced others to analyze the existing information and hypothesize that smoking is associated with lung cancer. Researchers then developed experiments to test the hypothesis and in 1956 the British Doctors Study provided the first convincing evidence that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer.

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Healing the Health Care Cost Conundrum

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A prescription for making US health care better quality, more accessible, and less expensive for all of us. 

The military health care system is different in many ways from the civilian system, but a primary difference is the income incentive. Simply put, health care providers and other medical professionals are not paid based on the number of patients that they see or the number of procedures that they do. Instead they receive a fixed salary with few if any bonuses for productivity or quality. The budgets for military health care institutions, and many others in the Federal government, are based on Congressional appropriations, not on productivity. This has been changing in the past decade but remains largely true today.

Civilian medicine is not so. They are paid for what they did, patients seen and procedures done, and everyone on staff is usually highly motivated to do more. Some have described such fee-for-service reimbursement arrangements as “you eat what you kill.” In some practices, that can equate to more visits and more procedures, even if some are not medically required.

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Using the Military Decision Making Process in Civilian Organizations

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One of the hardest tasks in any organization is to know your strategy, align actions to it, and equip people to perform the actions. Making decisions is the first step, and the MDMP can help. 

The vocabulary of the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) is not typical for civilian organizations, but the concepts are germane.  Translating MDMP into health care can be very useful for process improvement.

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