A revelation is taking hold in medical schools across the country that deprving medical students may not be good for their cognitive skills required to care for patients! Talk about great customer focus....


In an industry that actually takes an oath to do the right thing for the people they serve, there are a lot of things done that would tell their patients otherwise.
The latest revelation: Patients are people, not cases.
Amazing. There was a piece on the Today Show recently about physicians understanding how to take care of patients with chronic illnesses. In it, Harvard Medical School asked Richard Cohen, Meredith Vierea's husband, to visit with a group of patients so that they could understand what they were living with and how they could help them. That was great and very interesting, because these folks are living with life-long journeys and know more about dignity than most of us.
The thing that was amazing to me, is that a big takeaway for these big minds and medical students was to treat the patient like a "human, not a case."
And that really does indicate alot of how we are treated in medicine. The interest is in curing the ailment, the case. And the patient is frequently not even referred to by name.
Anyone who's spent any time in a hospital cafeteria or walked through the halls can hear it in the exchange between physicians: "Apendectomy at noon, Tonsils at three." Not WHO, it's the WHAT that the work is all about.
Humanizing medicine as the new big aha? What irony is there in that?
But what a big benefit we would all reap as their "customer" if doctors as a population would take this to heart and start treating and thinking of us as people.


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The Latest Medical Discovery: Treat the 'Who' not the 'What'

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jeanne Bliss
Jeanne Bliss began her career at Lands’ End where she reported to founder Gary Comer and the company’s executive committee, ensuring that in the formative years of the organization, the company stayed focused on its core principles of customer and employee focus. She was the first leader of the Lands’ End Customer Experience. In addition to Lands’ End, she has served Allstate, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker Corporation and Mazda Corporations as its executive leading customer focus and customer experience. Jeanne has helped achieve 95% retention rates across 50,000 person organizations, harnessing businesses to work across their silos to deliver a united and deliberate experience customers (and employees) want to repeat. Jeanne now runs CustomerBliss (https://www.customerbliss.com), an international consulting business where she coaches executive leadership teams and customer leadership executives on how to put customer profitability at the center of their business, by getting past lip service; to operationally relevant, operationally executable plans and processes. Her clients include Johnson & Johnson, TD Ameritrade, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals, Bombardier Aircraft and many others. Her two best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. Her blog is https://www.ccocoach.com She is Co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. www.cxpa.org