Time To Put The Brakes On Comparisons To Other Industries: Healthcare Is Different

The airline industry.

Automobile manufacturing.

Big tech.

For as long as I’ve been in healthcare, there’s been a pundit somewhere advocating that the people leading healthcare adopt lessons from other industries.

As someone who once suggested healthcare take a page out Procter and Gamble’s consumerism playbook, I never thought I would be writing this, but–

Quit it.

Enough already.

Let me take a quick step back first and acknowledge that healthcare of course needs to get better, and orthogonal perspectives are occasionally helpful in shaking free new ideas.

Problems arise, though, when people start with a decent enough analogy from their preferred industry, then quickly extend it beyond the breaking point.

The tone-deafness can actually get out of control.

One healthcare organization recently brought in leaders from a major hospitality company to help doctors develop better customer service skills.

Fair enough, you might think. As with many others in the industry, though, this organization is also struggling with things like workforce shortages and burnout, and its compensation levels aren’t keeping pace with inflation.

And yet a trip to the corporate offices of a hotel company is where this organization chose to invest its time, attention and cash.

Want to improve your healthcare organization’s customer-satisfaction scores?

Here’s a hint: try fixing those other meatier issues first.

Otherwise, good luck squeezing great customer service from a system that’s fundamentally broken.

Cross-industry comparisons have also fueled our industry’s scope-creep problem, with too many organizations trying to be something they’re not.

We’re not Amazon; we can’t perfectly predict the timing in which we’ll deliver care, as if it’s a book.

And no, we’re not Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons; we won’t make you smile every time you cross our threshold.

And yet too many of our industry’s leaders are attracted to these shiny objects.

We’re chasing far too much red herring, when we should be fishing for much bigger game.

Our industry continues to struggle with critically important things like coordinating care for cancer patients, for instance, or eliminating unnecessary waits and delays for all seriously-ill patients.

The reality is that healthcare is different, and it’s time to acknowledge as much.

Sing it from the mountain top everyone.

Healthcare is different.

On any given day, healthcare organizations produce the equivalent of thousands of SKU’s, with exceedingly high degrees of variability and personal nuance.

And those SKU’s can’t be picked up and re-packaged or trashed if you damage them, as is the case with consumer goods, media files or fast food.

Every one of them carries life-and-death implications for vulnerable patients.

These are the stakes our healthcare workers are engaged with, day in and day out.

And unlike in other industries, people don’t want our service.

Far from it – they only come to us when they absolutely must, and sometimes they don’t even seek help at that point.

Then, when things get really complicated, we’re still there to help.

Yet when people come to us with cross-industry advice and comparisons, rarely are they adjusting expectations to account for such complexity.This isn’t to say that we need to expect less.

Rather we must carefully account for context and not try to make all we do in healthcare routine or predictable – as in a logistically-neat operation like bookselling, or fast-food.

Those operations are predictable to the point of being ordinary.

Healthcare workers deliver the extraordinary, and we need to support them accordingly.

Meanwhile, it’s not like we lack examples of celebrated outsiders bringing their “revolutionary” thinking to healthcare, only to be quickly humbled.

The online media pioneer, former AOL CEO Steve Case (anyone else remember the daily spam of floppy disks and CDs?) in 2007 famously launched the almost-forgotten Revolution Health alongside a slate of boldface names from politics, business and major medical organizations.

He made pronouncements like, “If you give us 10 minutes, we may be able to give you 10 more years of life.”

If only there was a good medication for hubris.

Revolution couldn’t even give itself 10 years of life, much less give anyone else 10 more years.

Such failures haven’t stopped other boldface-backed startups from following suit, of course.

Tech and finance gurus Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jamie Diamond masterminded the creation of Haven in 2018. They then shut its doors after three years of struggles.

Elsewhere, big-tech has continued to stumble around healthcare while proclaiming its transformative potential (Potential always being the operative word).

Maybe the only outsiders getting rich bringing their perspective to healthcare are the many consultancies that have sprouted up in the past decade.

They’re staying busy even if their ideas seldom succeed in transforming their clients’ operations.

Again, all of this is not to say that we can’t learn from others.

Far from it.

But for those who’d like to deliver lessons from other industries in a way that healthcare organizations can hear, I’d suggest deeply considering how you’re delivering the message to healthcare leaders and workers.

We want to see healthcare workers inspired and honored, and valued for what makes them special.

This – and only this – will unlock their best work.

We cannot, under any circumstances, make them feel like commoditized line-workers or customer service representatives, when in fact their work cannot be further from that.

So adjust the messaging accordingly and we’ll listen eagerly.

And while you’re at it, skip the superficial issues and help us attack our thorniest, most fundamental problems.

After that maybe we can go off to see what the good folks at United Airlines, Toyota, Apple, and Procter and Gamble might be able to teach us.