No one at your healthcare organization will admit that they are wasting money, but that’s just what happens every day of every week of the year. When we try to do something about it, we hear the following excuses:

• “We can’t make changes that will risk patients’ lives.”
• “We have been doing it this way for years, why change now?”
• “I don’t believe the benchmarks, since we are different.”
• “We are too busy to make any changes!”

These excuses are holding back positive change at your hospital. As Larry Miles (the father of value analysis) teaches, “These excuses have no validity; they’re horrible shadows, things to stop action, to resist change and improvement.” Larry goes on further to state, “It’s like saying that cost doesn’t matter.”

Who gives these people the authority to say cost doesn’t matter? To deny this fact is, as Larry states, an “example of careless, sloppy misstatement and careless thinking.”

We have found that the biggest reason for waste and inefficiency in hospitals is that it isn’t the customers’ money they are wasting. It’s like Monopoly money that doesn’t seem to have any meaning to your customers. To change this costly attitude you must raise your customers’ consciences so they realize how much money their department and your hospital is losing by their non-actions. 

We believe you need to show your department heads and managers the economic pain they are causing themselves and your hospital by their non-actions. We are able to do this by showing our clients’ department heads or managers our Utilizer® Dashboard graphic presentations of their waste and inefficiencies which jump off their computer screen. It’s very impressive.

They can’t believe what they see in the graphs, statistics, and trend lines they watch develop. This shows them how out of step they are with their peers. Just recently, we showed a hospital how their usage of underpads was 5x their peers’, which made their heads turn.

No one ever said that changing minds and hearts was easy, but it gets much easier to do when you can show your customers the economic pain (graphically) they are causing themselves and their hospital because of their non-actions.

It might not be your customers’ money, but it sure puts a guilt trip on them when they see how much money their hospital and their department is losing because of their wasteful practices. In some situations, it can be tens of thousands of dollars a year being lost. Now, that will get anyone’s attention, wouldn’t you agree?