DailyKaizen

Lee recently wrote me and said he misses my blog posts. I’m still blogging, in two other spaces, on my sabbatical blog, and on the patient centered health information information technology blog.

I am judicious about blogging here because DailyKaizen is really about a story of transformation as opposed to a running commentary of happenings in distant places. And a sabbatical is really a wonderful opportunity to explore all of the things about a person, a professional purpose in society, and a community. I ask “Why?” not 5 times, but 25 times. Every day. If you ever get a chance to take one, don’t think twice about it.

It is with this greater-than-normal intellectual malleability that I listened to Pascal Dennis’ excellent podcast on Strategy Deployment as I walked the streets of our nation’s capital. I am engaging in a focused study of Hoshin Kanri now because I am going to engage in teaching to the generous funders I have been working with, and that is a story I hope to share here (can you say imposter syndrome?).

What I can share about my story is something that Pascal said, that strategy starts with identifying the gap to be closed. As Lee and colleagues transform a single health system, I am in society characterizing the gap to be closed in our macro health system, that includes a plurality of financing and delivery models. In a recent trek to Chicago to spend time as a guest of The Joint Commission (see: Thinking more about Interconnected HIT, Courtesy of The Joint Commission), I worked with an incredible group of people to characterize our nation’s gap and compare it to the gaps and action plans of other nations in the area of health information technology.

So now my energy regarding the gap is on a societal scale rather than an organizational one. Why? Because I can’t imagine ending my professional journey with the idea that a person’s ability to achieve their life goals through optimal health is dependent on the street they walk to to receive health care. I think the same is true for those who came before us, including Sidney Garfield, MD, one of the founders of Kaiser Permanente, as he wrote in a landmark publication in 1970.

This has resulted in me gently exerting a pull on Lee and colleagues to be transparent both internally and externally.

This blog is a product of my pull. Lee, my business partner Karl, and I, are also doing a national Webinar at the end of the month for the Association of Community Health Plans (which I will ask about sharing publicly, of course), also a product of my pull. These are not easy asks for me. I spoke to Karl and Lee on Friday in planning for the latter presentation. They are as busy as ever, as you can probably imagine from this blog, yet they put that aside for a few minutes to think about how to coach and guide others to close the gap that exists outside our walls. Thanks to both of you, and everyone in this audience, for making things better for every patient in every care system. We will close the gap, the one with a capital “G,” together.