At the Inbound Marketing Summit, part of the Future M events, last week, Dan Heathtold a story about a study conducted at Stanford University which found that an unkind rich person with a map was three times more likely to donate food than a kind person without one.
Dan Heath speaks at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston.
So what does this story have to do with marketing and SBR Health? During his talk, Dan made a point that particularly resonated with me: One-clickify the change you are seeking, meaning make it easier to change by removing obstacles in the path to change and minimizing the amount a person has to do to implement the new system. It means thinking about how to alter a situation to get a different result. The researchers at Stanford made it easier for the “less kind people” to donate food by telling them a specific item to donate and giving them a map to the drop-off location. Similarly, business leaders need to give others a map to allow easy adoption of their ideas or services.
Since joining SBR Health, I have talked to more than fifty doctors and specialists who are interested in using televideo in their practices, but find the technology either too difficult or expensive to implement. What is needed is a change management process that is the equivalent of giving the doctors “a canned good and a map.”
Therefore, my team and I are working with clinicians to figure out the shortcomings of their existing systems for monitoring patients and how televideo can overcome those challenges. For example, doctors mentioned that unnecessary hospitalization costs were a burden on their hospitals; however, without being able to see the patient remotely, a doctor had to ask the patient to come in or visit the emergency room for an assessment. Others mentioned the difficulty of conducting post-operative checkups for patients who lived far away from the hospital. Yet, others were faced with the challenge of connecting with a specialist when there was no specialist working in or near their hospital.
Telemedicine technology does already exist, but there are too many obstacles in the way of implanting it. During our conversations, some doctors indicated that a cart-based system was impractical for them to use or too few practitioners would be able to access it. Others didn’t have the time to go through the process of getting an expensive system approved by the hospital IT department. Still others worried that the technology wouldn’t work well over the hospital’s Internet connection or it would be too difficult to learn how to use.
Each of these conversations has further inspired us to continue working to refine the SBR Health telemedicine platform: an inexpensive and easy to use video communications product that efficiently and securely links together any combination of patients, clinicians, specialists and extended care givers. It’s our way of one-clickifying communication in the healthcare industry. In the meantime, if you have any ideas for us, please share your thoughts here.
