Tag Archives: Harvard Business Review

On the Unexpected Power of Bringing Heart to the Hospital

By Flip the Clinic

Last month, the well-known management expert Gary Hamel wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review. In it, he provided a powerful example of how small shifts can bring about powerful change—without depending upon funding, new technology, or an industry-wide revamping. It began with a story of a health system struggling to improve its abysmal patient satisfaction scores. Despite investing in tracking food quality, call light response times, effectiveness of communication with patients, and other reasonable metrics in its hospitals, the network of facilities wasn’t seeing any improvements.

Investing more money to improve amenities or to bring on extra staff would have both been logical fixes if the health system had the budget to do it. It didn’t.

After considering the problem for a few weeks, the system’s new CEO, Hamel’s brother Dr. Loren Hamel, landed upon an unconventional idea. He decided that every day would be “Bring Your Heart to Work” day. Read more