By Lavinia Weissman
Managing Director: WorkEcology a Community of Practice
Journalist: Strategy & Business -Leading Ideas, a web based journal
Executive Coach

Recent entries in Hospital Impact related to the payer system, organization, leadership, being a CEO – all of these entries made me think how can the “healer heal thy self.” The most recent remark that “people complain about “health care,” and not their personal physician” got me thinking. It is clear to me when we talk “health care” we objectify a system that we work at mechanically based on driving down costs and doing more with less.

So within that equation you have to ask, how can the people, who work in health care gain control? And what would control mean? And could people taking control over their lead initiatives for innovation and positive change? I then reflected what it would mean in some “systems” to actually call “time out,” and invite people to begin new conversations.

I returned to Boston in 1999 for some personal reasons and a hope that I would return to working in health care. I came back to a health care region, which was steeped in layoff and cost cutting measures. One day after I called an old boss at my former employer, Harvard Pilgrim, I opened to the Boston Globe and found in the headline, “HPHP $98M and in state receivership”. Based on my very limited view a lot of good people I knew had not stopped and declared “time out” and problems that existed when I worked there had multiplied.

With Charlie Baker’s appointment much has changed that is good at HPHP and other good changes are occurring in many places in the city. Yet, Massachusetts has the highest premium for health insurance and it remains to be seen how our universal health insurance system will be implemented. Many citizens in Massachusetts do not have access to the quality care a few get and rumor has it that we have a primary care physician shortage. I am not certain if that relates to being a State in which more people move out than in because we have the highest cost of living and a resident completing his residency cannot afford to pay back school and get decent housing.

What I don’t see are people taking “time out,” and opening up to conversations that are not mechanical and structured in the same old way. So if we assume good things are done each day in health care by physicians and many others, maybe what we have to heal is how we work together and hence relate to the patients and our administrative and budget leaders.

So I invite people reading this entry to comment here and declare an imaginary “time out” that others might take serious and join you in, and start off by stating powerfully, what kind of group you would like to convene and what kind of innovation would you like this group to foster?

In the management literature today, much research has proven that good innovation comes with very little investment. As Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of Strategy and Business recently stated
in an email introducing a report on this topic:

“New York, December 14, 2006 -- Booz Allen Hamilton's second annual study of the world's 1,000 largest corporate R & D budgets shows that investment can't buy success. The Global Innovation 1000 study identifies 94 "high-leverage innovators," including Black & Decker, Dentsply, and SanDisk, that consistently spend less than their competitors on R & D yet outperform their industries across a wide range of performance metrics. The study provides insight into how to get the most bang for your corporate innovation buck.”

For more on this topic, read this report:

Smart Spenders:
The Global Innovation 1000
by Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia

To read the full Resilience Report:
http://www.strategy-business.com/resilience/rr00039:

So maybe change in health care is not about the lack of resources and money, and maybe it’s about how we relate with each other and how we engage or don’t engage our time. If this can happen in industry, why not health care?