Friday, July 11, 2014

Marc-David offers his thoughts

Marc-David Munk has been writing a blog called "Considering American Healthcare" for a few months.  He has thoughtful observations about many topics, drawn from his experience, particularly in the quality and safety arena.

For example, check out this recent post about the dangers of replacing front-line thinking with corporate mandates. The lede:

It’s a common story to anyone who has been around big healthcare: senior management attempts to respond to a business problem by implementing a series of high level mandates that remove front-line management’s ability to think and make operational decisions. The policies and processes do improve consistency for a period of time, but soon the organization begins to strain under the weight of multiple, often conflicting directives and goals. As the directives increase, a new series of corporate metrics are imposed to confirm that the mandates are followed.  Front-line managers, hamstrung from above and unable to make flexible decisions, either find ways to circumvent the often unreasonable dictates, or watch as performance suffers and customers leave dissatisfied.

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