Randi Redmond Oster's Blog, page 3
May 9, 2016
Hello world!
July 19, 2015
Questioning Protocol – Engaging patients in a changing healthcare system
Engaging Patients in a
Changing Health Care
System
Christine Schaefer
In the Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence, the Customer Focus category (category 3) asks how your organization engages its patients and other customers for long-term marketplace success. The related self-assessment questions cover how your organization listens to the voice of the customer, builds relationships with patients and other customers, and uses patient and other customer information to improve and to identify opportunities for innovation.
As the U.S. health care system undergoes major changes, what are some effective practices for engaging patients in new and challenging contexts?
I recently spoke with a Baldrige examiner who responds to that question by drawing on both her professional expertise in business management and her personal experiences as the mother of a patient navigating the health care system for multiple surgeries.
Randi Redmond Oster is now in her second year on the Baldrige Program’s Board of Examiners. For more than a decade, she was an engineer and executive with GE Capital. She specialized in new business development and earned Black Belt Six Sigma certification. Oster later applied her business knowledge and skills in her role as a patient advocate for her son as he underwent numerous surgeries.
During those experiences, Oster saw numerous opportunities for health care providers to better engage patients and their families through information and tools to empower them. Today she works to educate hospitals and others on how to address such opportunities; she also has shared her insights in a book she wrote on empowering health care consumers.
When Oster works with health care organizations now, she says she “helps them understand the patient perspective today and ways they can move forward by being responsive to the dynamic change that is happening.”
She pointed out three key developments that have changed the ways that health care organizations must focus on customers today:
Consumers have higher deductibles. “Because they’re spending more money, they’re asking more questions,” Oster observed.
Consumers have access to more data on the performance of health care organizations and employees; for example, the Hospital Compare tool on the Medicare.gov site allows consumers to compare organizations on patient satisfaction measures.
Consumers are exposed via news outlets and social media interactions to negative health outcomes via stories about medical procedures. This creates a challenge for the health care community in terms of the satisfaction and engagement of health care consumers. For example, whereas historically wait times were long for patients, health care organizations will risk consumer dissatisfaction for long wait times today.
http://nistbaldrige.blogs.govdelivery.com/2014/07/15/engaging-patients-in-a-changing-health-care-system/
February 17, 2015
Ask “Why” and don’t be afraid to say, “No.”
Excerpt of Questioning Protocol featured in Creative Nursing
Questioning Protocol kicks off new section in Creative Nursing to focus on the patient perspective.
Subscribers only can view link in journal: http://www.springerpub.com/creative-nursing.html
February 1, 2015
Patient Experience Journal: Beryl Institute reviews Questioning Protocol
Book Review: Questioning Protocol Written by Randi Redmond Oster Barbara Lewis, MBA, Joan’s Family Bill of Rights
In her recently released book, Questioning Protocol Redmond Oster, takes the reader on a harrowing journey as she navigates the healthcare system while helping her teenage son’s battle with Crohn’s disease. Seventeen chapters build a chronological story of success, frustration and failure in dealing with modern medicine and a healthcare industry that may appear foreign to the outsider. Chapters such as Martian Mom in the E.R., Discovering the Root Cause and Figuring Failure Rate set the stage for a unique narrative that combines both heart and sophisticated analytics based on Ms. 18-year career in General Electric. For example, she demonstrates how a Six Sigma quality tool, used to help make tough executive business decisions with multiple stakeholders, can be leveraged by patients and family members. The tool, which can easily be used by patients, ensures that complicated choices include all points of view. Ms. Redmond Oster used this tool with her son, who shared in the decision making, along with his doctor, in choosing a nutritional approach instead of med deal with his Crohn’s condition. Ms. Redmond Oster’s background provides the foundation for her insightful healthcare observations. With a successful career as an engineer at GE, where she won numerous management awards including for one for her leadership of the design team for the stealth fighter electronic combat system, Ms. Redmond Oster learned that success is based on building high-performance teams to solve problems. She uses her process, efficiency and strategy skills to help understand the healthcare industry that is mired in outdated habits and may create victims of unfortunate preventable mistakes if some of the business tools she describes had been used. Her approach to problems, which are continually thrown at her, is eye opening. Ms. Redmond Oster explains best practices in a simple, fast-paced and easy-to-grasp language. At the end of each chapter Ms. Redmond Oster converts lessons learned into recommendations for dealing with the healthcare system. For example, in Chapter Five, and Battle-Ready, she suggests three action items that the reader can do: Fall 2014, pp. 133-134 Fall 2014 The Author(s), 2014. Published in association with The Beryl Institute and Patient Experience Institute Questioning Protocol andi Redmond Oster Joan’s Family Bill of Rights, BarbaraLewis@JoansFamilyBillofRights.com
http://pxjournal.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046&context=journal
January 27, 2015
WEGO Health Patient-Centric Research and Yours
Wego Health recommends reading Questioning Protocol and ePharma blogs about the book.
WEGO Health Patient-Centric Research and Yours
I’m looking forward to disclosing some new research findings about patient-centricity and the opportunities that patient influencers see for industry in creating a more genuine connection with patients.
But, until then, below are a few powerful books written by patient influencers that can help our industry move beyond the patient-centric buzz and better understand the day-to-day realities of the patient journey. And what’s better during a nasty winter storm than curling up with a hot beverage and a good book?
Questioning Protocol: An Empowering Toolkit and Personal Memoir
Author and patient influencer Randi Redmond Oster takes the reader on a candid, scary, honest journey from one medical procedure to the next. Readers ride alongside Randi in the ambulance in the middle of night, wait beside her as she stands guard over her son’s gurney while he seizes in an overcrowded emergency room, and root for her as she challenges and questions changing directions from multiple doctors.
It is the 2014 USA Best Book Award winner in health, and two universities are currently using it to teach about the patient perspective.
January 19, 2015
Martha Deed Reviews Questioning Protocol
Unless we die in a natural disaster or instantly from a man-made catastrophe (car crash, airplane explosion), we all someday will be patients. This rather obvious truth is one most people seem to wish into some dark unreachable mental cavern, not to be exhumed until the time comes. And then, there is shocked surprise and dismay as all too often the healthcare we utilize fails, as the business community says, to meet expectations.
People who might have lived suffer painful, preventable deaths. People emerge from the hospital cured of their disease on admission, become damaged survivors of preventable error. Numerous government-funded studies have demonstrated that approximately 25% of all hospital admitted patients suffer from fatal or significant medical error.
E.g. Daniel R. Levinson. 2010. Adverse Events In Hospitals: National Incidence Among Medicare Beneficiaries. Dept. Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General. oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-000...
We pay for these studies, but we do not know about these studies.
It took John James, PhD, the parent of a child who died a preventable death in 2002, to recalibrate the human costs: In 1999, the report of 98,000 preventable deaths each year from medical error was shocking. We now know the figure is more like 210,000 – 440,000 deaths/year. Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. His numbers are undisputed.
John James. 2013. A New Evidence-based Estimate of Patient Harms. Journal of Patient Safety.http://journals.lww.com/journalpatien...
It took Lenore Alexander to spearhead regulations in California to mandate post-surgery oxygen monitors after her daughter suffocated due to the lack of pediatric post-surgery monitoring. Her battle is not yet won.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszc...
It took Helen Haskell to push legislation in South Carolina mandating that all hospital staff wear badges with their name and job title when working with patients after her son bled to death post-surgery because his care was overseen by students when she had requested (and thought she had obtained) the expertise of an attending physician to evaluate the son who was deteriorating in front of her.
http://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess116_2...
While it is true that here and there medical professionals are attempting to fix the system, it is also true that when a loved one needs the hospital, each of us finds ourselves operating in isolation in an alien culture. It is disturbing. More to the point, it is dangerous.
The challenge patients and their family advocates face is to learn the hospital culture fast enough to save the patient.
http://sporkworld.tumblr.com/post/104698156846/book-review-questioning-protocol-by-randi
January 17, 2015
USA Best Book Award
Questioning Protocol is the winner in Health for the 2014 USA Best Book Award – General Health Category
http://www.usabooknews.com/health.html
January 16, 2015
Doctor Weighs In: Randi Redmond Oster questioning protocol
Paul Levy’s Book review is published in The Doctor Weighs In Blog.
http://thedocto rweighsin.com/randi-redmond-oster-questions-protocol /
December 19, 2014
Readers’ Favorite reviews Questioning Protocol: 5 Stars
Reviewed by Kathryn Bennett for Readers’ Favorite
Questioning Protocol: How One Mom Dispensed Equal Doses of Humor, Humility, and Corporate Smarts to Help Her Family Navigate Their Health Care Crisis by Randi Redmond Oster brings you health care solutions from a mother’s point of view. No parent wants to think about a health care crisis affecting their child or family and, when you are confronted with one, it can be hard to know what to do. Oster has supplied tips, tools, techniques, and skills to help you navigate these waters. The healthcare system is broken and yet we have to navigate it, so listen to her story on how she worked to help her son, how she created a team that was focused on him, and how sometimes she had to manipulate the hierarchy of the system to get him the best care possible.
As someone who has worked through the broken healthcare system personally, it scares me to think of having to do it with a child in crisis. Randi Redmond Oster shows an amazing amount of strength through a terrible crisis and shows us how it can be done, how we cannot be scared, and how to work through the system. There is humor at points and tears at others, making this book not only educational but compelling. I read this book in a very short time from cover to cover and was taken in by every word. If you are a parent or thinking about being one, this book is a must-read. You must prepare yourself for every eventuality so take this parent’s story and learn from it.
https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/questioning-protocol
