by Ted Eytan, on 28 Jul 2006 10:44 am
The Journey
From “leadership” to “citizenship”
I am again in medical practice this week, serving our patients in one of our downtown family medicine medical centers. During my use of our electronic medical record, I noticed a new feature that was recenty activated that allows us to easily link groups of care experiences together for our patients.
As a user of the system, I think this is just great - it will help us coordinate care better.
As someone who has accountability to maintain and develop the system, this is remarkable, because I know that we wanted to activate this feature about a year ago, but didn’t know when we would be able to because of other pressing projects. The assumption was that other work would be completed and this would get its turn. The other assumption was that our team would move this forward as the “leaders,” and that it would take the amount of time it took for something like this to be thought through. However, that’s not how it happened.
Instead, the issue of being able to do this came up at a recent rapid process improvement event, where the need was articulated by a care team taking care of patients, the feature was explored, and it was activated.
I wouldn’t have believed a year ago that some of the innovations we wanted to produce wouldn’t come from “us.” I assumed we would have to do it. Now, what I am seeing is that innovations are coming from the just the right place, where the impact to our member can be demonstrated. The people are the same, the process is just different. The “leadership” to “citizenship” idea comes from the Fred Lee book, “If Disney Ran Your Hospital…” It is a great discovery to see what every citizen can do to move things ahead.