One of the many things that I have always appreciated
about the employees at Children's Specialized Hospital is how many of you who
show no hesitation to ask questions and allow me the opportunity to give you a
different view on shared topic I’ve talked about.
This blog post is a result of the last State of the
State. I know some of you showed concern that all of this new technology was
going to "hurt" what we know as Children's Specialized; that it would
in some way change our ability to stay close to the families.
First, let me begin by saying that when I started working
here we had only five (5) locations. Today, we have 13 locations.
In each of our locations, families tell me that they feel
connected to our staff. They are struck by how each of you takes them into your
lives, and in turn you become part of their families.
Let me tell you, that doesn't happen by accident. It
happens because we live our values and we love what we do. You have set Service
Excellence Standards that we all work hard tolive up to.
We have dramatically changed our hiring practices so we
hire not only based upon your skills, but based on who you are and what kind of
heart you have. These are purposeful, deliberate strategies that we set out.
Yes, we always can do better to ensure we are all rowing in the same direction,
but we have made significant strides.
Secondly, there are things we may not see every day,
things that we shouldn’t necessarily be proud of that are an unfortunate
reality that many of our families go through. For example, we have 5,000 calls
coming into scheduling. No matter how many people we hire to answer the phones,
there are no more appointments to give them. Our wait for physician services
went up last year and we have wait lists for EVERY ONE of our services.
We continue to make great strides by using technology in
registrations – reducing upwards of 5,000 hours of face-to-face time that
parents have to wait to be registered by a person – creating a patient portal
so families have access to their records, pharmacy refills digitally, and
scheduling online in 2016.
But, we are still using modes of treatment that require
families to come to us. Families have said that there are times in their lives
that if they could do FaceTime or video treatment it would help them. If we had
a 24-hour billing department that would allow people to chat online to
understand their bill, like I can do with my cable company, that to would be
easier for them.
We will hold to our values and continue the good things
that we do have at Children’s Specialized. But we also have opportunities to
better meet the needs of our families by the use of technology and pursuit of
new ways to help their children meet their maximum potential that we must never
stop striving for.
Disagree? Or did I miss your concerns? Let me know in the
comments below.
3 comments:
Agree. It is helping and hurting. As everyone is moving forward, we cannot forget there are still folks without access to technology. Will Medicaid fund these devices so they can be served? There are so many with low income who can't afford computers or other technology. How can we still serve them while moving ahead?
Technology for many is a scary thing but for some of us, an absolute dream! True, I am a bit bias being one of the System Administrators for UltiPro BUT it is systems like UltiPro that are truly here to make our lives easier.
Whenever I get a complaint from someone about UltiPro (or any HR system) I tell them to jog their memory back to the days of filling out APRs by hand, faxing/inter-officing resumes to Recruiters, and filling out carbon copied change request forms. I know that I wouldn't want all of that back so I am grateful for the technology that we have at our disposal. Not only does it make us better at what we do but it means no more hand cramps from writing too much!!
This month's issue of Autism Spectrum News (Winter 2016) is on this very topic. There are some really great articles. http://www.mhnews-autism.org/back_issues/ASN-Winter2016.pdf
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