We all know that you get what you measure. When we experience a dysfunctional organization, we know that we should be suspicious of the objectives that managers and employees are motivated to achieve. In fact, based on the experiences we’re having, we can often guess at the firm’s compensation structure and/or culture. Here’s one example that is top of mind for me: Someone hit my car when it was parked. Their insurer was GEICO. Within 30 minutes of the accident, GEICO called me, told me they were taking responsibility and arranged for appraisal and repair. GEICO is obviously optimizing rapid claim settlement for “no brainer” claims.

U.S. Healthcare Industry: Focused on Productivity and Quality Metrics

There’s been a lot of discussion about how broken our healthcare system is. We pay for transactions, not outcomes. Physicians are measured on their “productivity,” e.g., how many patients can you see (and bill for) in a day? Hospital staff are rewarded for getting patients out of beds as quickly as possible, but fined if that patient winds up back in the hospital within 3 weeks.

The Role of Customers in Creating Metrics in Business Design

Over the last two years, in my roles both as prospective customer and concerned citizen, I’ve been engaged in the strategic planning for a new local healthcare center in my community. This week, our group is “going public,” taking the wraps off our stealth project in order to engage many more people in our community in the design and go/no go decision-making for this effort. That means that I can share with you a bit of the behind the scenes work that has taken place to-date. As you read through this “work-in-progress” case study, I’d like to call your attention to the granularity of the metrics that came out of one (of what I hope will be several) customer co-design sessions. In this article, you’ll experience two of the customer stories our local community members created. From these customers’ stories, we inferred some objectives for this new healthcare practice. They may appear to be unusual. But that’s the point. For example, our customers said, “Success for us is being on as little medication as possible.” Without that customer input, I doubt we would have thought of having that being one of the objectives of our health center. Check out the full story.