Friday we had our quarterly leadership development institute. It is sort of a retreat day where we focus on a particular topic or issue. This one was a reflection of last year’s accomplishments and next year’s goals, but the day began with a presentation of a report, the result of a effort by the New Jersey Hospital Association to obtain an independent and objective analysis (a “warts and all” review) of the state of New Jersey’s hospitals. They chose Accenture, which I think did a great job.

Before I worked at Lourdes, I worked for a hospital trade association and I’ve seen a lot of reports. Some can be self-serving, but this one is quite good because it demonstates that everyone needs to try harder in order to make real improvements in the in the delivery of care.

Up until now, I’ve spent my healthcare career in Pennsylvania. When I started at Lourdes last year, I could tell that the regulatory environment was much different, and in particular the organization of physicians and their relationships with hospitals. The Accenture presentation helped to clarify those differences and to point out how public policy, government programs and compensatory behavior conspire to create circumstances that impact hospitals, and more importantly, the patients they serve.

As just one example: New Jersey ranks 33rd in the use of hospice care among Medicare patients in the last stages of life. That means a lot of things. It means patients are probably being overtreated. It can mean that doctors and nurses are failing to have good, honest discussions with families. It means families and patients are not facing reality and demanding that “everything be done” when in fact the compassionate and decent thing would be to make sure the patient is provided as many dignified and pain-free last days as possible.

A summary of the report can be found at: http://www.njha.com/publications/HCNJ/HCNJV15No6.pdf

Looks like the holidays took a bit of a toll on our blog. If everyone else has been like me, the new year started out busy and hasn’t let up. And it doesn’t look like it is easing up any time soon. Lots to do. The March issue of our Physician’s Practice Magazine supplement had to get done and we were running late. We needed to get the ad out for our first heart month event, and two presentations, not the least of which the big “Our Blog Test Kitchen” talk at the “Using the New Web 2.0 for Corporate Communications” seminar at Philadelphia University.http://www.prwebfire.com/

Personally, I had a great time and learned a lot. It was also very inspiring. Great company all around. Met some nice people from our friends at Fox Chase and got to see our buddies from Main Line Health. Also present, Mr. Al Paul Lefton, President of one of Philadelphia’s premier advertising agencies. I had to tell him how much I respected him as a result of a Philadelphia Business Journal profile a few years back. In it, he talked about how their agency does not participate in awards contests. I can’t tell you what a refreshing move that is, especially these days. All of those agency awards are a big scam. It’s like kindergarten where everybody winds up with a prize. You pay to enter and are pretty much guaranteed something when you leave at the end of the dinner. Plus, the award winners are not required to demonstrate any ROI for the client. Don’t get me started.

Christopher Barger from IBM gave a terrific keynote, with lots of content and good examples, including a mention that some of IBM’s 250 bloggers are focused exclusively on healthcare. I checked it out and will be linking some of them, and their links, very soon. IBM has quite a vision as to how blogging fits into the corporate structure, and it was good to hear him end his talk with some tips on when not to blog–which was kind of where I was headed with my presentation. One of his points was not to blog if you don’t have a goal in mind.

In preparing my talk, I was thinking about the reasons we became involved in this project, and one of them was that it allowed us to provide a new media outlet to reflect the mission and values of this organization.

The conference offered lots of value-added information. I feel lucky to have been there and that we were given this opportunity. For those who missed what I had to say, here’s the cribnote version what I said. I explained:

1. How we got involved
2. Why we got involved (one of them–it was a way for us to reflect our values and mission through new media)
3. The process we used to gain buy in and get it rolling
4. And yeah, we’re glad we did it.

I finally figured out how to link files (hooray), and at the conference I got a good explanation of the whole RSS feed thing, so I promise next post I’ll add some content.

Also learned one other thing. We need to keep this more regular, so I need to check in with our bloggers. And I think it is time to perhaps search for a few more to lighten the load.

This is like learning to ride a bike and twirl saucers at the same time.

I’m anxious to get some blogs up here, but I haven’t figured out how to use this site–certainly not enough to lead the others in our team. I’m not understanding how the draft feature works. I don’t know why you can’t find us if you search for Lourdes. (Am I supposed to add key words somewhere? I didn’t see that on the dashboard.) Oh, yeah, and one of our bloggers can’t access the blogger.com right now because our security system won’t give him access. (That–I’m working on.)

I neglected to mention that this experience is occurring right in the middle of a major overhaul of our website. It hasn’t been updated for quite a while, and it has taken me the last year (my first year here), to get up to speed on the things that need to go and stay. Plus we have a new design, so we are making major renovations.

So I’m in a mad dash to get the website looking presentable for any additional company we receive.

But I digress.

I think in the first post I overlooked the part of the process where I checked with our IT folks about the blog. They had no problem with it and thought it would be fairly easy to do; however, as I reviewed the original e-mail, I realized that they thought the blog would be for internal consumption only–something they would connect to our Intranet. My fault for misreading. We have an outside agency that handles our website, and I went to them to assist us, and to help us fast since time was ticking away. Options were tossed around, but this is where we wound up. We’ll see if these features work for us, but they need to work for now.

For this first blog, we have a little catching up to do, so let me fill you in. Back in early November, Lou Antosh and Carol Ann Kell approached us here at Lourdes about becoming a “blog test kitchen,” offering to help us launch a corporate blog that would be a way for us to explore new media.

I have to admit, my first thought was, “I’m a 45 year old woman with no kids who barely uses her cell phone, what do I know about blogs?”

But almost simultaneously two memories rushed into the same spot that was currently occupied by panic: 1) the moment in 1983, during my internship at the City Paper, when the editor asked my prediction about USA Today and I said, “who wants to read a national paper. ” And 2) my cluelessness in 1993 when I remember thinking, “I¹ve got to find about this world wide web thing before somebody asks.”

So I don’t purport to be the Amazing Kreskin.

What I am attracted to, and why I have kept an eye on blogs (even occasionally reading some as I accident upon them while googling other things) is this: they are made of words.

That’s right. It appears this is one place where the English majors have a leg up. After a decade of websites ruled by kids with substandard art school degrees, who’ve gotten to tell us adults what’s “in and out” like some kind of web version of Heidi Klum, it actually becomes about thoughts and feelings and words. It isn’t about the bling anymore. Once again, content rules.

So, to me, that is exciting.

Part of the excitement is that is just seems to right a major wrong. Most of my career has been spent working with graphic designers and dealing with the print world, where words and design live in harmony on the page–where sometimes one must yield to design or vice versa. When I started working on websites, this all changed. Writing had to change, and often webmasters had no concept as to how the page should best operate for the customer–which in our case involves people interested in literally life and death issues. They are a different animal than most consumer-oriented sites where people may be more tolerant of flash.

So the writing part seems like a new and interesting way for us to reach new people who may not know about Lourdes, but first, we need to make it happen.

And if we can make an impact on what people think about health care, about health policy, about community benefit, even better.

Immediately, my friends and colleagues expressed worry about whether anyone will read it. I was worried about getting people to write it. As someone who has taught college-level writing, I know the hard part is getting people to do their homework. I won’t worry about the end result until later. These are the other things I’m worried about:

- We need to organize our goals, short and long term. (What do we want to achieve?)
- We need to figure out who would be good at this and approach them. Who would be a good writer? An entertaining one? Someone who can give a realistic view but be a good spokesperson. Let’s be honest we want people who are champions but not polllyanna.
- What is our process? Who are our editors? Who will need to read this before it goes out into cyberspace?
- How will we train people? Lou can offer a sesson, but how can we get them together?
- Can we get this organized and up before January when we are presenting the results of our “test kitchen” experience? (See info on January 10 seminar: http://www.prwebfire.com/)

So it took about two weeks (actually a little less), but through a combination of discussion among marketing and PR and human resources, and an e-mail to select managers, we found our bloggers. We decided from the start to focus just on one of our campuses for simple logistics. Getting staff from both hospitals to one location is always difficult, given comittments and schedules, so we concentrated on Our Lady of Lourdes in Camden, and located a physican who is a member of our bioethics commitee, a social worker who does community outreach with the homeless in Camden, a massage therapist who is about to graduate from the Lourdes Institute of Wholistic Studies, our own writer/editor and me–blogging about the blog.

Blogging about the blog has some intrinsic and historic value, at least for marketing people. I was concerned about everybody else. Prior to the training, I was concerned we would lose at least one of our bloggers, who was concerned about our purpose in creating the blog. He (rightfully) did not want to be used as shill for the school and/or the hospital.

So we have five altogether. It would have been nice to have another clinical person, but it is just too much to ask people, especially this time of year.

And it is also the kind of off-hours project people don’t even have time to ask about. You either know what a blog is or you don’t, and if you don’t, you don’t have time to ask, and if you don’t have time to ask, you don’t have time to read them.

After the training, which included a discussion of developing ground rules, I did develop some. I’ll share in a future post.