Fixing the “Not My Problem” Culture in Healthcare – #KareoChat

It was pretty shocking to hear the news of the passing of Jess Jacobs, patient advocate and Aetna innovator. Life is certainly fragile and Jess’ passing was a reminder of that to me. While I certainly didn’t know her well, I’d had a chance to meet her a few times at HIMSS and Wen was nice enough to share a great picture of Jess having fun at the New Media Meetup which I organize. That made me smile.

As all the tributes to Jess Jacobs poured in, I admit that I didn’t know a good way that I could honor her memory until I was asked to host this week’s #KareoChat. Queued off of Ted Eytan, MD’s tribute to Jess, I thought it would be valuable to talk about what he calls the “Not My Problem” culture in healthcare and how we can change it in this week’s #KareoChat Twitter chat. My only regret is that we didn’t have this conversation while Jess was alive. I’m sure that she would have really added some depth (and likely a bit of snark) to the conversation. Instead, I’ll have to hope she’s smiling down on us trying to make the lives better for patients that are suffering in our health system like she did.

KareoChat - Not My Problem Culture in Healthcare - UnicornJess

You can follow along and participate in the #KareoChat on Thursday, August 18th at 9 AM PT (Noon ET). We’ll be discussing the following 6 questions:

  1. Have you seen the “Not My Problem” culture in healthcare?  Where and what impact did it have?
  2. How can small practices avoid the “Not My Problem” culture that sometimes exists?
  3. What can a small practice do to become more patient focused?
  4. Will becoming more patient focused be good or bad for a small practice’s business? Why or why not?
  5. What can we do to better help chronic patients who are suffering like #UnicornJess suffered?
  6. Do we see the “Not My Problem” issue in health IT towards doctors?  How?

As Dr. Eytan said in his post, I don’t think the people in healthcare are the problem. Most of the healthcare providers I know care deeply about the patient and want to be more patient focused. However, our system pushes a culture that often destroys the patient experience. Hopefully, in this chat we can talk about ways we can overcome or change that culture for the better of patients so that future patients don’t have to endure the painful patient experiences that Jess Jacobs had to endure.

If you want to learn more about Jess Jacobs, many people who knew her did this #UnicornJess Twitter chat where they told a lot of stories and memories about her. Also, the family has asked that donations be made in Jess’s honor to the Walking Gallery, a cause that was important to Jess.

Full Disclosure: Kareo is an advertiser on this blog.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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