I want to preface this with something I should have said a long time ago:
All posts reflect my own opinions, not those of anyone I’ve had the good fortune to learn from, work with, and otherwise spend time around.
It could hardly be otherwise with my own blog. But addressing folks in healthcare, you’ve got to be a bit careful.
IT folks get it, but in healthcare we’re not all individuals, much as we’d like to think otherwise. We are born from a very old profession, and that means being tied like nobody’s business to colleagues, training academies, membership societies, support staff, patients, and public opinion. Say the wrong thing, and you step on some toesies of other bees in the hive.
And that’s a problem, when it comes to innovation.
So That’s Why Docs Are Luddites
The practice of medicine is unique — but not in the way most doctors think.
We’d like to believe that we’re free-thinking patient advocates, when we’re actually tied down like Gulliver by the Lilliputians.
The doctor-patient relationship is undoubtedly special, which is why there’s such universal pushback from physicians when anybody — insurers, practice management groups, or IT folks — tries to tell us how to do our mission-critical jobs.
But the heroic freedom to conceive of any and all means to render quality healthcare ends about 2 feet from the computer keyboard. Right about where all the other parts of the system begin that a doctor plugs into (MAs, nurses, phone staff, insurers, etc). “Without me, you’re nothing,” they can claim, just as rightly as the physician.
No wonder doctors are traditionally conservative, and resistant to technological change. How can you be nimble and daring when everyone’s got a piece of you?
Not that it stops us doctors from feeling influential — which we definitely are. But influential isn’t innovative. We’re influential because we’re heavily invested in the outcomes, and because the medicolegal buck stops with us.
That’s not nimble and daring. That’s conservative and solid — and not in a good way.
East Is East, And West Is West, So…
Organizations do one thing extraordinarily well: bring resources to bear on problems that no individual can match.
Individuals (or at least small groups of them with an entrepreneurial spirit) excel at something else: thinking outside of the box, and changing course quickly without inertial barriers.
Right now, we need us some more of that box breaking, even though we can’t get anywhere as a system without resources and backing.
How to start developing that innovative edge?
- If you need to justify it to someone using business language, pass them The Innovator’s Prescription, by Clayton Christensen.
- If you want to see an example of fire in the belly and how to stoke your own flames, read Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk.
- Creativity nurturing 101 and 201? The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield, and The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.
- Want to follow professionally progressive folks in real time? Subscribe to the blogs and tweets of Brandon Betancourt, Sonia Simone, and Amber Naslund.
- And get any book by Seth Godin. If you have to pick just one, run, don’t walk, and get All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories.
(The Amazon.com links are affiliate links, to books I’ve bookmarked and highlighted the heck out of, even on my Kindle.)
