If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently - Book Review

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Fred Lee has a great story-telling talent and a unique combination of first-hand experience of working at both hospital and Disney. This book compares their workflows and cultures and teaches us how to design modern hospital patient interactions for success. It turns out that his lessons are directly applicable to our business.

Whenever a medical billing service owner comes to me for "billing software" they usually mean software to manage what they had. I, on the other had, want to understand how their service is designed and delivered and what the practice owner (their customer) and the patient (their customer's customer) would expect. It seems to me that if the billing service is sub-par, outdated, or not profitable, we should consider redesigning it before automating it. I believe that the worst you can do to a poorly delivered service is to scale it up and exacerbate an already negative customer experience by delivering it faster to more customers. This often does not sit well with billing service owners who see my expertise limited to selling my software and see my questions about their business approach and growth, compliance, and convenience as needlessly intrusive.

You would think that a billing service owner has a much more difficult customer than Disney; the risk of client loss is higher; the medical billing environment is much more complex with many more non-standard situations. At Disney, the customers start our happy and excited instead of upset and underpaid. They stand in lines but not worried about their insurance claims, patient referrals, or compliance. They take a ride that's duplicated a million times while every new payer is a unique experience. Meanwhile practice operations, technology, and legal costs are growing. Disney looks like a picnic compared to the nightmare the billing and practice managers face every day in a hostile payer environment over which we have very little of the kind of control we would have at Disney.

Using examples from his work at both Disney and as a senior-level hospital executive, Fred Lee challenges the assumptions that have defined customer service in healthcare. In this unique book, he discovers the key similarities between Disney and hospitals - both provide an "experience," not just a service. It shows how any business can emulate the strategies that earn Disney the trust and loyalty of their guests and employees.

This book also shows how standard service excellence initiatives in healthcare have not led to high patient satisfaction and loyalty, and defines 10 principles to help ant business gain the competitive advantage that comes from being seen as "the best" by their own employees, consumers, and community.

This book is practical and profound. Instantly useful.

Know any health care providers who complain about shrinking insurance payments and increasing audit risk? Help them learn winning Internet strategies for the modern payer-provider conflict by steering them to Vericle - Medical Billing Network and Practice Management Software, which powers such leading-edge billing services as Affinity Billing ( http://www.psychiatry-billing.com/ ) and Billing Dynamix ( http://www.pt-billing.com/ ), and is home for "Medical Billing Networks and Processes" book by Yuval Lirov, PhD and inventor of patents in artificial intelligence and computer security.

Book Review: Outliers

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"The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder." -Outliers

The tagline of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is: The Story of Success. I think that's a topic of interest to most folks and coaches in particular. I've got a story about a teammate of mine who is the definition of the opening quotation.

My teammate, let's call her Susie, was an all-American at the University of Wisconsin, which was a top twenty-five team at the time. She was the best, most skilled, and hardest working player that I knew. She had aspirations beyond collegiate volleyball...Susie wanted to represent our country in the Olympics. She talked to one of our assistant coaches who'd played on the national team about what she should do...and the coach told her to work harder.

I'm telling you, Susie was already the hardest working player on a nationally ranked team! She was our best player, she was the undisputed leader, she was a baller. But if she wanted to move to the next level, Susie needed to work harder.

And if we want to be better, we've got to work harder as well. And so do our athletes.

The rundown: Like Daniel Coyle talked about in The Talent Code, Gladwell identifies ten thousand hours as the magic number for success. It's not just ten thousand hours of casual practice...but motivated, focused, persistent practice. We've probably all coached the athlete who gives up about twenty seconds after we've tried to teach her a new skill. We've got to let her know that "success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds."

Recommended for: Coaches who want to get better and who want their athletes to get better. I believe we all want to put ourselves and our players in the best position to excel and reach our highest potential. This book will motivate us all to put in the work necessary to never have regrets about our achievement level.

Not recommended for: Coaches who believe that hard work is all it takes to be successful. While Gladwell talks about the ten thousand hour rule, he also mentions things that are out of our control that influence success. Things like the month and year we're born, the era in which we're born (if I were a woman fired up about coaching a hundred years ago, I'd be out of luck), affluence or lack thereof, etc.

So, Susie didn't make the Olympic team. As I think back, I wonder what would have happened if she'd stuck with it, because she was almost at her ten thousand hours. Gladwell says that it takes about ten years to reach that threshold...Susie stopped playing in year eight. We didn't know about this kind of stuff back then.

But we do now...let's make sure we're using the information that's available to us.

Dawn Redd is the Head Volleyball Coach at Beloit College. Come visit Coach Dawn's community of coaching nerds and team leaders over at her blog, http://www.coachdawnwrites.com/, where she teaches how to become an excellent coach, motivate individuals, and build successful teams.

Her book, Coach Dawn's Guide To Motivating Female Athletes, is available for purchase on her website.

Follow Coach Dawn on Twitter: @CoachDawnWrites

Moonwalking With Einstein

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Have you ever wondered who the world's smartest person is? In a world that celebrates the antics of the world's strongest people very little time is given to those who excel in mental pursuits. Such antipathy for mental prowess put Joshua Foer on a quest to find out who might fit the bill of world's smartest person. When he began his quest, he did not discover who the smartest person was in the world...rather he was introduced to the world of the mental athletes.

Foer's path crossed with the like of memory champions Ben Pridemore, who could memorize gargantuan amounts of numerical digits and the layout of five decks of cards in just a few minutes. Such mental prowess piqued Foer's curiosity and set the journalist within ablaze to discover all he could about their techniques. His quest propelled him along a path which would ultimately culminate in his competition in the U.S. Memory Championship.

This trek placed him in the pathway of interesting individuals-such as Britain's Tony Buzan, an educational consultant who is credited with developing the "mind mapping" technique of taking notes. After meeting with Buzan, Foer enlisted the help of a youthful United Kingdom memory competitor, Ed Cooke, to coach him and prepare him for the U.S. Memory Championship. At Ed's behest, Foer dove into available literature-finding references to mnemonic techniques from around the fifth century BC. Not wanting to leave any stone unturned, Foer also tracks down Kim Peek, the inspiration for the character in Dustin Hoffman's Rain Main, to determine if there were any memory techniques he could glean from an obvious savant..

Foer unearthed techniques many refer to as building a memory palace which allowed him to "store" information spatially along routes of which he was familiar. Want to learn a list of 75 words? No problem. Imagine walking through your house and assigning these words in bizarre contexts (include the most sensory stimulation you can) along the pathway. Suppose the first item is an aardvark...you might place the inconspicuous fellow outside your mailbox juggling the second word you need to remember. Then, when called upon to regurgitate the list you would simply walk through these pre-constructed locations and recall the mental images. Foer used this very technique to place in key events and ultimately win the 2006 National Memory Championship. Not only did he win, he set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of playing cards in a minute and 40 seconds.

Although the title seems a little bizarre, it is not until you are reading his blow-by-blow account of the championship that you realize that one of his "mental images," was Foer moonwalking with Einstein to help remember a playing card. After the championship, Foer settled back into journalism and is not sure that his overall memory was changed very much.

This book is commended as a good read of an interesting memory challenge.

But wait, where did I put my car keys?