Since my son will be attending the University of Chicago in the fall, I had the opportunity to sit in on the incoming student forum. This is a high powered academic liberal arts college with several heavy duty graduate programs. The first two sessions were about pre-med and business/economics. By the way, they don’t actually call it pre-med anymore, now it’s pre-health. The department chair elaborated that many of the students use the undergraduate education to go into other health fields, such as dentistry or veterinary medicine. Nothing about chiropractic education, but that’s a topic for … [Read more...] about Soft Skills in Health Care and Business
Customer Service and Marketing
The Healthy Company
How can I make it so everyone on our team works towards a common goal? How do I deal with agendas, politics, poor communication, clashes in value systems, etc.? Every practice manager is faced with these types of questions and challenges. This is not specific to a health care practice, but is present in all business groups regardless of size or scope. Patrick Lencioni is one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers on this subject. His basic book, “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team” is written in allegory, narrative style. It’s quite easy to read through and digest, and has become … [Read more...] about The Healthy Company
The Sea of Entitlement
The current dominant theme you will face as both an employer and health care provider is one of entrenched, unconscious entitlement. Entitlements have been a part of our social and legal landscape for a long time, but this feature has grown and become progressively more crippling and destructive to the normal course of business. Entitlement means a legal claim to receive or to do something, many times relating to money. It’s not the same thing as a right, such as those outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United … [Read more...] about The Sea of Entitlement
A Culture of Service
All healthy businesses exist for the purpose of providing their customer base with goods and services that are sold at a profit. That much is fairly obvious and self-evident. Past that however, the concept of serving customers in an excellent manner gets murky and muddied. In many markets, including in health care provision, excellent customer service is the delineator between a thriving, high-energy practice and one that suffers from low exposure and utilization. This has little or nothing to do with the technical skills or knowledge basis of the doctor, and everything to do with the … [Read more...] about A Culture of Service