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Article: Befriend A Doc
Gain An Ally
Originally Published in Materials Management in Healthcare Magazine, April 1999 issue.
Push or pull physicians in the direction of change, and they’ll probably resist. Embrace them instead and you may gain their acceptance. The idea is to build physicians’ respect and confidence in you. This sets the stage for effective value analysis. Use an approach we call the “circle of confluence,” which incorporates four Cs: contact, champions, communication and cooperation. First, it’s crucial to establish regular contact with physicians. Naturally, you’ll want to conduct focus groups and surveys to understand their needs and ideas. But it takes a little more effort to build lasting relationships. Identify and be active in
committees that are central to physicians’ deepest interests, such as infection control, the operating room and quality. To prove you are committed to their interests, sponsor in-house seminars on new modalities, procedures and therapies. Grab their attention with seminars on products like silver-coated catheters, which can reduce nosocomial infections.
Project champions pave the way Physicians respect their peers, so cultivate relationships with ones who will champion a cause and lead teams or committees toward common goals. For example, the value analysis process at Pennsylvania Hospital is very successful, in part because physicians themselves lead the teams. Regular communication is fundamental. It gives physicians the opportunity to share and digest diverse ideas. It can also generate new ideas by putting old ones into context. Publish newsletters to keep physicians fully informed about your philosophies and actions and aware of your sensitivity to their needs. Ask for the opportunity to present new programs and initiatives at medical staff meetings and luncheons. Most of all, truly listen when physicians tell you about their concerns and problems. Then act to resolve them. By serving and working with physicians without expecting anything in return, you’ll build lasting alliances. For instance, lead the way to facilitate capital equipment requests and resolve product and quality problems. Combined with contact, champion development and communication, this will bring confluence full circle and enable cooperation on common goals and challenges. The circle of confluence is a continuous process, not a onetime event. Keep the loop closed by continuing to build on the four Cs.
Basis for value analysis With mutual respect and confidence established through the circle of confluence, you can take full advantage of the ultimate cost-cutting tool—value analysis. Provided you remember one, often-forgotten, principle: Value analysis is based on studying the function or purpose of a product or service. Once functions are fully understood, exact functional specifications can be written for the item. This is the foundation for finding lower-cost, equivalent products. (See “Putting the ‘value’ in value analysis,” September 1998.)
Who “owns” a product? Time to set the record straight: Groups of physicians don’t have widespread control over purchases—individual physicians have control over specific purchases. In any set of physicians, only about 10 percent can be considered “owners” of a particular product or service, and another 10 percent may be “stakeholders.” A Full 80 percent have no ownership or vested interest. Part of our job is to identify the owners and stakeholders and meet their requirements. Strong alliances can help you identify every physician who “owns” a particular product or has a vested interest in it—and keep you from omitting anyone. Fail to include anyone who holds a stake in the decision, and the project itself may fail. Such alliances also set the stage for the next, difficult step: learning the precise needs, functions and features required of a product, translating them into language everyone understands, and writing new specifications for an alternative product that meets those requirements. The result: Whole new vistas begin to open up in the areas of savings and quality improvement opportunities. A collaborative atmosphere enables everyone to see these opportunities, digest them, and act cooperatively. It all starts with the four Cs.
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