With technology and financial pressures having penetrated all levels of healthcare, it can sometimes seem as if the industry has become distracted from its fundamental human mission.
During a January Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, Ryan Donohue, strategic advisor at NRC Health, and Jorge Torres, managing partner at JIT Associates, discussed the resurgence of humanism as a core pillar of organizational culture and its implications for the entire healthcare industry.
To support staff, health system leaders should strive to make employees feel valued and motivated. To create feelings of being valued and motivated, leaders must create a work environment that transmits a sense of belonging. "Motivation comes from a sense of belonging, a sense of relevance and a sense of achievement," Mr. Torres said. He suggested that to achieve those goals, organizations must ensure their employees are listened to, given the tools they need to do their work and provided with appropriate training — and that applies to all categories of employees: administrative staff, healthcare professionals and front-line leaders.
Most organizations have established transactional cultures, but their goals would be better served through transcendental cultures. A transactional culture is one in which employees feel they are exchanging their time for a paycheck, but they don't see the relevance of what they do on a day-to-day basis and are not inspired to go the extra mile when the occasion calls for it. "When organizations adjust their structures, policies, procedures and leadership skills to make [their culture] more transcendental . . . that's when people get aligned and start performing to their max," Mr. Torres noted.
Mr. Donohue added that a transcendental culture is measured by how effectively compassion is — or is not — built into the patient journey, which starts before patients are in the physician's office and continues after they have left. "There is nothing compassionate about trying to book an appointment these days and being met with, 'We're not scheduling for three months,'" he said, alluding to a typical healthcare transaction that patients go through.
Another touchpoint that calls for a more human-centric approach is the moment consumers pay for care. "One of the most painful transactions [a patient] can have is paying for care, which is often the last major touchstone. We're not that compassionate in most billing offices and we don't give guidance to people who are going to remember those last few steps of that journey," Mr. Donohue said.
The 5th industrial revolution is going to be driven by organizations connecting with people in a human way. Those organizations that are able to pivot from a transactional to a transcendental culture and create a strong sense of belonging, purpose and relevance for their employees — and act compassionately toward patients — will win out.
"We need to restore the humanity to healthcare and it's the perfect industry to start because it's the industry that needs it the most," Mr. Donohue said. "If you can't be treated as a human when you're receiving healthcare, what else matters?"