Treat doctors like customers

Doctors aren't feeling the love. Many are discouraged, frustrated and angry. They discourage their children from growing up to be doctors. They drop out or burn out. Perhaps, if those who employ and regulate doctors treated them more like customers instead of provider cogs in an impersonal system, they would feel a whole lot better.

Happy employees make happy customers and doctors are no different. No sector is immune.

Tony Hsieh, the technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist who built Zappos into a $1 billion internet shoes and clothing powerhouse, died unexpectantly. He was 46.

In a 2009 profile in Briefings magazine, Mr. Hsieh described himself as a lifelong skeptic who sneered at psychology and philosophy. But his computer science background led him to believe that happiness could be studied as a science. Rather than assuming happiness is achieved haphazardly, he began to read about the distinct characteristics that made people happy.

People assume that achieving a certain goal or winning the lottery will bring lasting happiness, he said, but it rarely does. “Most of the frameworks for happiness conclude that there are four things required: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (meaning the depths of relationships) and being part of something bigger than yourself.”

On the other hand, if your parents are pushing you to be a doctor instead of a poet, here are some tips.

For example, if employers treated their employed doctors like customers they would start by doing a physician customer satisfaction/engagement inventory. Here are some suggested questions:

1. Definitions of engagement vary, but it generally includes pride, loyalty, and commitment. When engagement scores are low, physicians take little pride in the hospital, would not recommend it to a job-seeking colleague, and believe that the hospital’s mission and vision are not in sync the needs of patients. On the other hand, engaged physicians are more likely to perform better in every area, including patient care, education, and research, which benefits everyone. Using this definition, how would you rate your level of engagement (1-low, 10-high)

2. What do you think if the biggest barrier to physician engagement? Lack of transparency? Adminstrator-physician conflict and misalignment? Differing metrics for doctors and administrators? Corporatization of medicine? Others?

3. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

4. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

5. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

6. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

7. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

8. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

9. Do I have the freedom to take risks?

10. Is this a learning organization that excels at innovation?

Here are some ways to measure physician engagement outputs:

1. The number of idea or invention disclosures and whether they do it more than once
2. How eager they are to engage in conflict resolution
3. Whether they cover each other's back
4. How they talk about your organization and treat fellow employees
5. Attrition rates. Measure the footsteps out the door
6. How often they volunteer to do things and actually show up and do them
7. How often they do things out of pure self-interest instead of organizational interest
8. What they talk about on the grapevine
9. Trust levels
10. The quality and quantity of internal and external networks.

Based on the responses, then focus on solutions:

`1. Create solutions for the jobs doctors need to get done, eliminate the pains it takes to get them done and create a whole product solution that exceeds their expectations.

2. Create metrics to measure the results, like alignment, execution, engagement and satisfaction.

3. Use data analytics to measure compliance and positive outcomes and create a personalized doctor experience.

4. Use e-marketing and behavioral economic techniques to reward and encourage positive behaviors

5. Turn employees into advocates and brand allies by showing them attention, affection and appreciation.

6. Translate doctor customer satisfaction into patient customer satisfaction

7. Lead innovators instead of managing innovation

8. Create policies and procedures that are user friendly

9. Create a sandbox that is fun

10. Practice open innovation

11. Give them the education and training they need to move from being knowledge technicians to strategic thinkers

12. Eliminate useless mandates, administrivia and non-value adding health IT chores

13, Practice corporate emotional intelligence

14. These techniques apply not just to health systems, but BIG PHARMA and BIG DEVICE as well as they go "beyond the pill" and transforming med tech to techmed. For example, here are five strategic efforts can help biopharma medical affairs teams master customer engagement in the digital age. They can be reduced to the 5Cs: 1)Knowing the customer and subsegments, 2) creating communication channels, 3) distributing content, 4) determining and measuring the culmination or results of your efforts and , 5) continuous engagment improvement based on your findings.

15. Give them the tools they need to win the 4th industrial revolution.

If you really want to get fancy, create a sample group that gets the intervention and compare it to a control group that did not and remeasure satisfaction/engagement at an appropriate time after your intervention is complete. Just be sure to test you ideas.

Most leaders say they’re customer-centric, but if everything they measure is company-centric, how could that be true? Revenue, growth, and similar Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure how customers are performing for the company. But organizations that wish to be customer-centric (and maximize growth) must also measure how the company is performing for its customers.

Now, while customers typically don’t have online dashboards with data visualizations that reflect how a company is performing for?them, customers?do?bring to every interaction a purpose, problem, need, intent, or question — a desired outcome — along with expectations for how quickly or easily that outcome will be realized. These outcomes can be measured by associated Customer Performance Indicators, or CPIs.

Sick care practices its share of stupid business tricks. They don't seem to understand that happy, sustainably engaged doctors make happy, sustainably engaged patients and that, in most instances, you can't have one without the other. Ultimately, it is the players on the field who score the points, not the coaches on the sidelines.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@SOPEOfficial and Co-editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship

Updated 5/12/2022