EP230: The Best Way to Improve Patient Outcomes and Satisfaction and Reduce Burnout, With John Lynn, Founder of Healthcare Scene, Expo.Health, and HITMC

Today I’m talking with John Lynn, founder of Healthcare Scene as well as two conferences, Expo.Health and HITMC. If I was going to frame out an overarching theme, I would suggest that it is this: Organizational culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Let’s consider the scope of this statement: Ambulatory patients spend about 84 minutes on average in clinic. Of those, 7-12 minutes are with a physician. Inpatient, I imagine, has probably an even greater ratio. So those 7-12 minutes are hypercritical, of course. I would never suggest anything that minimized the doctor-patient relationship. But how many times has a doctor’s patient grade gone down because of someone nasty at the front desk?

All of the other individuals that a patient meets in the non-doctor portion of their visit, all of the moments that happen in that time frame, all of the care coordination that does or does not happen ... all these things have a significant and meaningful impact on not only the patient experience but also patient outcomes.

So, how do you get the front desk and the back office and the middle office and anyone on the phone to recognize the importance to the mission of attaining the quadruple aim of health care? How do you get the janitorial staff to see their role as crucial in the prevention of health care–associated infections (HAIs)? The IT team to feel proud that they have helped with physician burnout by making the tech help doctors instead of slow them down? Or the finance team to consider the financial toxicity of their actions? Or the medical assistants to enter the correct blood pressure or whatever data so our predictive analytics actually work?

The answer to all of these questions points back to strong leadership. It’s building a culture of love, as John Lynn puts it. He means aligning around a mission to do right by patients and give them the best care and outcomes that we can.

Consider this, though: A culture of love can be within one organization, but it can also be cross-organizations. Peers come together and share their experiences and their best practices for the purpose of improving patient care. Then they can take their enthusiasm and passion back to their own organizations. Doing this disperses a culture; it promotes a way of thinking that connects day-to-day drudgery with an endpoint that we all can be proud of.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that establishing a real culture of love is the best way to achieve patient health in health care, a better patient experience, fewer burned out doctors and nurses, as well as other business results. If you’re interested in how all this connects to patient experience, by the way, listen to EP228 with Julie Rish.

John Lynn is the founder of the HealthcareScene.com network, which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 11,000 articles, with John having written over half of the articles himself. These electronic medical record– and health care IT–related articles have been viewed over 18 million times.

John also manages HealthcareITCentral.com and HealthcareITToday.com, the leading career health IT job board and blog. He also organized the first-of-its-kind conference and community focused on marketing to health care: HealthITMarketingConference.com. Plus, he launched Health IT Expo, a conference focused on practical health care IT innovation.

John is an adviser to multiple health care IT companies and a highly sought-after keynote speaker. John is deeply involved in social media and, in addition to his blogs, can be found on Twitter at @techguy and @ehrandhit.