]]> A colleague here at Capgemini, Carla Heimbigner, frequently posts on Capgemini’s Business Transformation Blog. This post struck me as an important one to share as it offers some ideas we can all use reminding of now and then. Enjoy.

Carla Writes: Recently on a trip for work, I decided to grab a magazine in the airport. Judge if you wish, but I decided on some light reading from Redbook.  “The 30 best things you can do for your kids” highlighted on the front page, caught my eye.  In reading the 30, I decided to see if they could somehow pertain to work as well.

1. Do not be a couch potato

The article spoke to leading by example, and ensuring your kids get proper exercise.

My correlation to work is, lead by example. If you expect your employees to work hard, do so yourself.

2. Be accepting of everyone

The article talked about teaching your children tolerance, acceptance and compassion.

Correlation to work is, be sure to round out your team with diverse people.  Creativity comes from the group, not one person who looks for people just like themselves. Ensure you cultivate and build a strong diverse   team.

3. Get everyone together for dinner.

Correlation to work, get the team together for outings once in a while. Whether it be bagels and coffee, a team lunch or fun Fridays. Food and fun have a way of bringing people together.

4. Skip makeup sometimes.

Correlation to work, be real with your people. Don’t sugar coat the truth. No need to put it in a box with a big red bow on top. They are professionals and can handle the truth.

5. Take them to work.

Your people are already at work, so make it fun for them to be there and more importantly help make it a place where they want to stay.

6. Be their watchdog.

As their manager, you need to have their back. Be willing to go to bat for your people. Take care of them and they will take care of you. Good managers surround themselves with great people. Great people look for managers who will take care of them and have their best interests in mind.

7. Have great manners.

Remember to say please and thank you. Even adults/employees like to hear please, and they do appreciate Thank Yous!

8. Give life a soundtrack.

Sing at work or whistle a tune. No matter how good or bad your voice is, a little song now and then brings a smile to all.

9. Say no.

Be willing to say no on behalf of your people.  Example, “No, I am sorry, I can’t ask my people to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week.”  “They need work life balance and we need to hire more people.”

10. Be consistent.

Be consistent with the entire team. People want a manager that is fair to all.

11. Take great care of yourself, so your kids don’t have to.

Take on the hard tasks, fight the fight and get the road blocks out of your teams’ way, so they can concentrate on their core competencies.

12. Give them the money job in the kitchen. (i.e. not just peeling potatoes)

Look for stretch assignments for your people. People want to be challenged and are willing to take on new things.

13. Teach through storytelling.

Share your past experiences and allow them to share their’s. We can all learn something from each other’s experiences and more importantly, we can work together to create a story together that we then can tell for    others to learn from.

14. Don’t judge them.

Unless you have walked in their shoes and know what is going on in their lives, never be a judge. Ask questions, seek to understand and you may come to realize they have a lot to offer.

15. Get them involved in community service.

Instill in your people a willingness to help. Help one another. Work as a team , share, teach and learn.

16. Watch with them (referring to TV, etc).

Since TV is not part of my personal work day, we’ll leave out the TV part and rather speak to …. Be an active participant with your people. Get involved with them. Set up 1:1’s to spend quality time, even if it’s 15 minutes a week / a month to get to know your people on a more personal level.

17. Introduce them to the world of money.

Explain the business to them. Outline how their role plays into the entire business. Help them understand how the company operates, how the company makes money, and how important their role is to the success of the company.

18. Let them lose.

Support them, yet on occasion, people need the opportunity to lose. We often learn more in losing, than we do in winning.

19. Make them laugh.

A good laugh does the body good. Everyone is not a comedian, so this may be hard for some of you, but this is more about creating an environment where people like to come to work.

20. Break the dress code.

Perhaps once a week/month/quarter try FLIP FLOP FRIDAYS. Good work and creativity doesn’t always need to come from suits and ties. Let down your hair, take off your tie and let the creative juices flow.

21. Tell them about the first time you got your heart broken.

Tell them about your failures – lessons you learned. Humanize yourself as a leader.

22. When you’re home, unplug.

When you are with them, be with them. If you are on a call with them, don’t multi-task and read email. If you are with them in a conversation, don’t be texting or taking calls. Be present, be aware and be with them.    Give them your full attention.

23. Learn from them.

We can all learn from one another. Be willing, be open and seek to learn something new each and every week.

24. Be modest.

Be a leader, lead by example.

25. Please, don’t smoke. And if it’s too late for that, quit.

Enough said.

26. Talk to them about sex.

Not sure this is relevant to work. So we’ll leave this one alone.

27. Read together so they will learn to love books.

Do brown bag sessions together where as a team you are learning new things.

28. Have some faith.

We all need it.

29. Celebrate their inner beauty.

Celebrate your team members for who they are. Continue to build on their strengths and help cultivate and grow your team within the company.

30. Encourage them to take risks.

So if you had the opportunity to write a book about   “The 30 best things you can do for your employees?”  what would your top 1,3,5 be?

]]> Healthcare has been a user of Case Management techniques for as long as there have been patients needing recurring care. Organizations that struggle to sustain their own Case Management technical solutions may want to consider ‘as a Service’ (aaS) options for their Case Management environment.

Capgemini colleague Lee Smith writes about this capability in our Capgemini CTO Blog. In viewing Case as a Service as an architectural diagram, working from the bottom up there are a number of layers which would be required:

• Infrastructure and Hosting Services: These will provide the core infrastructure on which the solution will run and is aligned to the Infrastructure as a Service layer.
• Case Management Platform: These provide the core Case Management capabilities including Process Management (which needs to be flexible), the ability to define the Case constructs, the ability to capture information into the core solution from multiple different channels and the ability to manage the information in a compliant manner. For Healthcare, key service requirements include consent management for access control to private patient data, and robust audit trails.
• Case Accelerators: To make CaaS a success the solution will provide a core Case platform will need to be extended through Case Accelerators which will provide components which make the deployment of Case solutions easier and faster. The Accelerators will need to be built on flexible foundations which enable the components to be configured to the specific business rules of a Case Solution. Healthcare CaaS implementations will incorporate proven care protocols and scripted dialogs for patient interactions over phone.
• Case Solutions: These are the final solutions which will be delivered to end customers which will enable them to operate their Case style business functions, examples of which include Investigative Case Management, Eligibility Management or Incident Management. There are many different examples across many different sectors. For Healthcare, CaaS may incorporate telehealth and telemonitoring services.

At the core of any Case as a Service platform will be the need to provide utility based pricing. There are a number of levers which can influence the cost of a Case solution including the complexity of the Case process, the number of Users, the number of Cases and the amount of data captured for each Case. Any solution will need to flex commercially to cater for the various needs from service consumers.

]]> Whenever we talk about cloud computing, security is at the top of people’s concerns. Many studies show that it’s the main barrier to organizations adopting cloud and applying this technology to make their operations more efficient or customer-centric, even when in many healthcare ecosystems (especially in the US as we recently argued at HIMSS), cloud is part of what is needed to tackle the spiraling and unsustainable cost of care.

In healthcare there are particular reasons to approach information security with the greatest caution and respect. The Physician-Patient relationship is underpinned by the guarantee of confidentiality. Data breaches or information leaks have the potential to undermine Providers. But surely there are ways to manage these risks and secure the data in the cloud, just as we currently do with traditional client-server architectures? And isn’t information that is stored in the cloud and accessible only to authenticated users safer than data stored on hard drives and portable devices?

The answer is yes in both cases. Protocols and safeguards exist which can secure data both in storage and in transmission, ensuring privacy, accountability and regulatory compliance through encryption and access control. Anxiety about data security in the cloud is often motivated by a perceived loss of control over the data which comes with it being hosted by a third party, perhaps in a shared multi-tenant environment. It’s only human that we feel less confident about protecting data when we don’t know where it is physically located. How do we know it is safe from outsiders or hackers? How can this data be secure when it is available via the internet? It rarely occurs to us that cloud services providers have the resources and specialist capabilities to deploy better security measures than many individual Providers or Payers could in isolation.

The biggest risk is not security but availability of data in the cloud. How will your organization continue to function if the information system it works with goes down, whether through network connectivity problems in your facilities, or technical issues on the part of the cloud services provider? What is the business continuity plan, and how can we ensure that these risks are mitigated through effective backups and contingency? In a healthcare environment, lives may depend on the answers to these apparently technical questions.

For more on securing the cloud, read Capgemini’s latest point of view Trends in Cloud Computing.

]]> On Thursday (March 22) ONC released a final Program Information Notice (PIN 003) for how HIEs would/should/shall deal with privacy and security of patient information. To some this would seem to be a bit of closing the barn door after the horses have fled. Most states and communities have made their technology selections and gone well down the road of implementation. Based on some immediate reactions, it would appear not all technology vendors of considered the standards ONC is pressing for. Hopefully those vendor contracts had a provision for evolving the products to meet evolving requirements (at no cost).

As this blog has commented on in the past, financial sustainability of a HIE is a race. A race to delivering value and gaining widespread adoption. As one HIE program noted, “the goal posts have been moved again”. Hard to run to a goal if the goal is redefined and moved in mid-race.

I wonder how ONC (and their external advisers) can accelerate its thinking to get back in synch with the state programs so they stop risking HIE program financial sustainability…and avoid seeing these programs go belly up without enough recurring revenue…ultimately wasting the Federal ARRA funding that will have been spent.

Thoughts?

]]> Today I supported a group of 10 healthcare provider organizations in the kick-off for their joint TeleHealth implementation program. Their aim is to reach an unprecedented level of TeleHealth penetration: in 4 years at least 10% of the healthcare services delivered will include TeleHealth modules. Our first task is to develop the program that will realize this aim and will provide for a sustainable business model within the sometimes idiosyncratic rules for cost reimbursement.

The number of ideas, pilots and projects around TeleHealth is quite large, to which the 10 provider organizations involved are no exeption. However, hardly any of these projects have actually led to the structural embedding of TeleHealth in their daily operations. The providers agree this needs to change. A larger scale is needed to enable the sustainable development of TeleHealth services as integral part of the health services provided to the patients. Hence their collaboration.

Patients are becoming more and more demanding in terms of the way they want health services to be organized and delivered. This fits well with the participative outlook on health services that all of the involved healthcare providers have adopted. They are all in the business of rehabilitation of patients after major trauma or surgery, or as part of the treatment of complex chronic conditions. Such a specialization provides fertile ground for self-determination and self-management by patients and their informal care providers. Hence the need to implement TeleHealth services.

Together with patients, care professionals, executives and technology developers we have just embarked on an intense and inspiring 10 week journey to filter through all the possible TeleHealth applications, assess their value for patients, work out their implications in terms quality and efficiency of care, and combine them into a feasible implementation program. This will provide the scale for real-life integration of TeleHealth in healthcare and for ongoing innovation and evidence gathering around TeleHealth applications.

If you have any specific ideas, technologies, or research reports that can help us on our journey, we welcome your input and keep you posted on our progress. Please join us in bringing TeleHealth come to life across a broad spectrum of healthcare services!

]]>  

I thought our readers may be interested in this event being held on March 6th.

Social Media and Mobile Health: Creating Value

MARCH 6, 6pm-9pm

Capgemini Offices – 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 210, South San Francisco, CA 94080

FACCSF Life Science and GABA have invited experts to present their solutions and to discuss the challenges in making the healthcare system more cost effective and efficient.

Specific panel topics to be discussed:

•           Cloud-based platforms for practice management, medical billing, electronic medical records and patient connectivity

•           New mobile devices for monitoring health conditions

•           Influencer Marketing methods for Health 2.0 start-up companies to spend their marketing budget most effectively

•           Available online resources to create new Health 2.0 apps

 Moderator: Benoit Berthoux, Principal, Life-Sciences Practice, Capgemini

For more details and to register, click here.

]]> Please visit us at the Cloud Computing Knowledge Center. Pickup a copy of our new Point of View document, Connecting Patients, Providers, and Payers in the Cloud: The Capgemini Way.

On Tuesday Feb 21st, 4:15-5:00pm, attend our presentation there at the Knowledge Center. Topic: Cloud computing can help healthcare agencies collaborate to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs – but how do they transition to cloud? What are the implications for their operating models, interoperability and information security? In this session we’ll offer our perspective on implementing and realizing benefits from cloud-enabled collaborative exchange model and back office improvement.

]]> On 13 and 14 January one of my colleagues, Jacob Knudsen and I participated in the annual meeting of the Danish Society for Quality in the Healthcare Sector, DSKS. The theme of the well-attended meeting was “Quality in the Encounter with the Patient”. During the two-day event, a number of workshops and presentations dealt with how the interaction and communication with the patient can be improved. The main message of the annual meeting was that hospital service design needs to be improved in order to meet the expectations of patients.

So what do I mean by “service design”?  According to Wikipedia, service design is “the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.”

Is this a hospital discipline? Yes, very much so. As a hospital manager you constantly have to monitor the service you give to your patients, and increasingly consider how to use digital services to meet patient expectations.

Nursing Director of the Aarhus University Hospital, Vibeke Krøll gave an excellent example of this. She told of her meeting with a young man who had been admitted to the hospital with a serious disease. He had asked her what he was supposed to do with the 18 (!) documents which the hospital had sent to him in the letter with his appointment to go to the hospital.  The incident caused hospital management to start a project to analyse patient communication. The analysis ended with a pilot project where appointment letters were sent electronically to the patients and where the large number of documents had been reduced to a minimum. After the introduction of the digital appointment letters, patient satisfaction was measured and – perhaps not surprisingly – a large proportion of both young and elderly patients were very satisfied with the new initiative.

Nursing Director Vibeke Krøll concluded her presentation with an appeal to the hospital staff audience to go home and have a closer look at the communication with their patients.

One of the workshops of the annual meeting cast a light on the ways in which digital communication can improve the experience of patients. Among the list of digital services discussed were webbooking, text reminders, self-service check-in at the hospital, the ability to communicate with the hospital ward, clear display of waiting times, apps with various kinds of patient related information, and others. Many of these techniques are available and well-established.

So perhaps we should follows Vibeke Krøll’s suggestion.

]]> A new Danish national strategy for telemedicine is about to be decided upon – but will it deliver more than words?
My daughter is a diabetic type 1 and has been so for 11 of her 20 years. She regularly takes time off from University to go to the University Hospital in Aarhus, where she meets some excellent diabetes doctors, helping her and giving her the ability to manage her diabetes and control her long-term blood sugar levels. She’s a very busy young lady – not only studying Molecular Medicine, but also doing elderly care in a part time job, visiting and helping an elderly handicapped woman, doing her sports, seeing her boyfriend and pursuing all the social stuff you do as a full time student. She is very much empowered and keen on coping – coping with life in general, and coping with her diabetes. She is very active in communicating by iPhone, laptop etc. with her friends, with university – but not with the hospital! She has to attend her regular appointments – taking time out from other activities, travelling by bus to and from the hospital to meet the doctor – often after some waiting time, which she of course kills by communicating digitally.
She is not alone. Approximately one third of the Danish population has a least one of the most common chronic diseases. And many of these could be treated more efficiently and with a substantial cost saving for society by using telemedicine.
Therefore I was very enthusiastic when I was invited to comment on the draft for the national strategy for telemedicine. In my opinion telemedicine is a win-win. Patients will gain and so will society. The focus of the strategy was to ensure further penetration of existing telemedicine solutions that were ‘known to work.’ The new government has committed to focus on telemedicine, with ambitious and binding goals for e.g. regions and hospitals.
What are the recommendations?
The Danish National telemedicine strategy has more than 20 recommendations to ensure a focus on citizen-centric treatment across sectors. Here are some examples to give you a flavor:
• Binding goals for using existing video conferencing platforms (for translation, doctors’ conferences, visits, control, discharging conferences and telepsychiatric consultancies)
• Wound treatment from a centralized wound treatment center for all municipalities
• Binding goals for knowledge sharing of telemedicine experience for all municipalities and regions
• National prioritization of chronic diseases to be addressed by telemedicine
• Funding to maximize penetration of telemedicine solutions
• Financial incentives for adopting telemedicine treatment
• Financial models for development and support of a common IT-infrastructure
• National standards and reference architecture for e.g. security, clinical data and booking
• Citizen gets easy access to healthcare data, and self reported data are used in healthcare
Reading through the recommendations it is very clear that there are a lot of stakeholders involved in formulating and realizing this. And it is very clear that this is not only about technology – but about organizational and financial incentives. So my thumbs up for this!!
Will the strategy succeed?
Any strategy should be focused, actionable and backed by necessary funds. It’s not yet possible to judge this strategy on these criteria – because the focus, actionable and funding parts are left to the next phase of the work.
Hopefully this work will result in a clear focus on one or two chronic diseases, which can showcase the potential of telemedicine. But even with a clear focus, the actions and funds to back this, it will be a long journey for all stakeholders involved. And definitely not a quick win.
Therefore I’m afraid that my daughter will have to continue for at least the next few years with time-consuming visits to the University Hospital. These are currently the best option for her. But they’re a waste of time for her and for me. I hope the strategy will get telemedicine to fly, and soon.