Collaborative Promotion

February 5th, 2008 by Kenneth Cohn

I encourage you to read Jeanne Bliss’s post, The State of Customer “Focus” Around the World: 2007 in Review, in which she talks about ways to deliver a better experience for users of our services.  Although her comments arise from observations about other industries, they seem applicable to healthcare:

“The struggle still remains to connect the silos and get everyone on the same page…. It’s not the fact that the silos exist that’s the problem.  It’s their lack of coordination and conflicting metrics.  The silo management approach does not work.”

For those who are dissatisfied with traditional ways to measure physician satisfaction, please evaluate Fred Reicheld’s book, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth , Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006.  He classifies people as promoters, passives, or detractors, based on their answer to, “How likely are you to recommend this organization, service, or department to a friend or colleague?”  The follow-up question is “What are the primary reasons for your evaluation?”

Porting the results to a 2 (high vs low value of relationship) x 3 table (promoters, passives, or detractors) allows one immediately to see whether a physician whose relationship is very important to an instiitution (for example, a neurosurgeon) places the same value on the relationship.  If he places a much lower value than you do, it may take only a brief phone call to find out what is detracting from the relationship and correct it in a timely fashion.

A CEO in St. Louis used her assistant who managed the physicians’ lounge to survey physicians monthly from the physicians’ lounge using these two questions, which the assistant put into a spreadsheet to track responses over time:

  • “How likely are you to recommend this organization, service, or department to a friend or colleague?”   
  • “What are the primary reasons for your evaluation?”

What do you think:

  • Does measuring physician satisfaction yearly give you actionable feedback
  • Have you lost an important referring physician because you fell out of touch with his or her needs
  • Could the net promoter score be implemented in your organization

I welcome your input.

Posted in Physician Engagement

Share Your Opinions