Improve Your Internal, Cross-Organizational, and Client Relationships

No matter what you do in the world of health care, you have important client relationships with other organizations: internal customers, external customers, payers, providers, patients, suppliers, and partners. When those relationships stagnate or go off-track, improving them is difficult. Anecdotes, innuendo, and opinion about performance typically become the key points of discussion and getting to the root-cause facts can be challenging.

Health care professionals are buried in data that measure and track how cross-organizational relationships and processes are functioning. There’s probably a trail of data that documents what occurred between your organization and your clients. Unfortunately, using that data to describe and help diagnose events is uncommon and underutilized.

By uncovering and examining issues in a non-judgmental, fact-based way, you can get everyone focused on facts. With facts as your foundation, you can solve the issues, find mutual improvement opportunities, and build trust and cooperation.

This can be broken down into 5 easy steps to conduct a successful client-shared data analysis:

• Do your homework
• Agree to take a fact-based look at the business process
• Conduct your analysis
• Present analysis and prepare for discussion
• Determine how to move forward—and do it

Analyzing data with clients is not as much a matter of creating complex and lengthy research reports as it is a way of approaching a client issue with a fact-driven approach. Use this 5-step prescription is a good starting point for how to get started improving your client relationships.