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It's OK to be lucky when you're lucky, but it's not OK when the issues are critical. Too often, we manage by anecdote, which is OK when you can afford to be wrong, but when finances are tight, or the market is overregulated, or a lot is at stake, making mistakes is not an option. Evidence-based management depends on attention to three components: analytics, decision making, and problem solving. These are skills that should be required of everyone who assumes a management position, no matter how high or low one is on the totem pole. Understanding basic analytical techniques, knowing how to apply these techniques to making good decisions, and learning how to become a skilled problem solver ensure that, when we manage our businesses, we minimize the risk of mistakes and maximize the potential for positive outcomes.
KEY WORDS: EbM; analytics; decision making; problem solving; management.
If what you are doing is working, keep doing it. But if it's not, then do something different. Change occurs when the pain of where we are at is greater than the fear of change. So the two questions are these: "Is what we are doing working?" and "How much pain are we in right now?" For most of us in the healthcare field, the changes have been so great and occurred so rapidly that change is pretty much our only option if we are to thrive into the future, and managing on anecdote has become too risky when resources have become so precious.
Evidence-based management (EbM) is a model, of sorts, that uses evidence, or facts, rather than anecdote to initiate change through effective decision-making. It drives our business decisions and actionable change.
There are three motivating factors in healthcare that should cause us to move very quickly toward EbM in our industry. The first is improving profitability. A question that I ask at many of my workshops is this: what is the primary responsibility of a medical practice? And the response that I receive the most is this: quality patient care. Here is the dilemma: if you are broke, you can't provide quality patient care. Unless you are the federal government, you will not survive very long if you are spending more than you are...