To borrow a line from an old Paul Newman film, “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Whether you’re a physician, an office manager, an office staffer, or an EMR vendor/service provider, if you’ve ever sighed deeply or gritted your teeth, there’s a certain eye-to-eye linkage that just isn’t happening.
The stakes are too high to mess around: at the top level, everyone really does want an EMR adoption to succeed. Nobody can afford to let it fail.
Why can’t we all just get along?
The ONE Key Thing
One of my favorite books describes what the most persuasive being of all time used as a deal closing question: Is there anything I can say that would change your mind? References to Lucifer aside, this is one of the most critical and overlooked issues in marketing, or the art of persuasion:
To be successful, don’t make what you think people want and try to sell it to them; ask what they really want and then provide it to them.
The key word here is “ask.”
Many of us come from hard-won positions of authority. You know what you know, by dint of hard work, navigating the treacherous waters of office politics, or years of carefully accumulating critical data.
And when someone asks you a question that they really ought to know better than to ask, what happens? Your eyeballs cross — especially if it’ll cost you time, sweat, or money to deal with.
A natural reaction. But exactly the wrong one, if you want your implementation to succeed.
The Wrong Vibe
The problem is, everyone involved in the implementation process thinks they know what the real problem is, and the finger is never pointing at themselves.
- Office staff are fed up with templates that repeatedly hang at the same spot.
- Physicians are frustrated at a workflow that in no way parallels their natural habits.
- Medical directors are flustered at being nickel-and-dimed for support services that they’ve already bought.
- EMR support staff are tired of wrangling with third party hardware and software services outside of their own control.
Everyone is right, from within their own section of the world.
But how far is anyone going to get, saying “You just don’t get it, do you?”
Internet infopreneurs learn what works faster than anyone I know — because they can change their information marketing quickly if need be, and if something works, they earn money in a hurry, and if it doesn’t, they starve.
And Important Lesson #2 they live by:
You won’t make any long term, mutually beneficial relationships by pissing people off. Telling them you know better than they do what’s good for them is a prime formula for doing just that.
Your tech support guy is very probably right when he says the modification you desire would crash your system; you telling him “it’s not the way I do things” isn’t going to make the silicon chips grow wings and fly. If you’re a techie and your users tell you your new upgrade will multiply their workload by a factor of 10, insisting on its other benefits will not make their repetitive tasks any easier.
Even if you actually do know better than the other guy what the problem is — especially when you know better — you need to put on your humble, “Let us reason together” hat. Or you’ll be spending a lot of time staring at each other over crossed arms.
The Natural, Obvious, Best Vibe
Think back to the last time you were really in a bind — time’s up, no resources in sight, you’re totally screwed — and you suddenly got saved and you were so grateful, you wanted to kiss your savior right there and write them a letter of recommendation that’d get them promoted to the vacation spot of their choice, forever.
- Did your savior know their business? Of course.
- Did they lord it over you? Probably not.
They probably made it look easy, no trouble at all, like this was what they were there for, they did this kind of thing all the time.
They probably put you at ease, this will work out, we can handle it.
Most important of all, they quickly identified and acknowledged your fears, and made resolving them their immediate top priority.
Would you go back to them over anyone else, if you needed assistance in the future? Would you recommend them to your friends and colleagues? Would you be well-disposed to their organization, because of the incredibly helpful human face they gave it that day?
See where this is going?
The Hat You Wear Should Be The Other Guy’s
You may not choose to wear that Ultimate Service hat; maybe your momma never showed you how to be that nice, or you’ve forgotten how. Perhaps it’s not entirely appropriate, in your position in the organization.
But even from a purely mercenary standpoint, you need to know what works for the long haul. In the short term, it’s enough to know your material — just barely. But for ongoing relationships and word of mouth buzz, you want people to be deeply, totally convinced of your awesomeness.
Ultimately, we’re all of us in a service industry, either as health care providers to patients, or tech support for the providers. Being thoughtful, clear, and pleasant will always be useful both for giving good service as well as receiving better service yourself.
And if you don’t quite know how to do that, just ask: “What can I do to help you out of your difficulty?”
