Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to PG Pulse Press, Ganey's podcast on all things healthcare, tech, and human experience. In this podcast, we'll be joined by some of the best and brightest minds in the industry to discuss challenges, share insights, and innovate the future of healthcare. Thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: These are two really terrific people, and as I think probably most of you know, they came to healthcare from the hospitality industry. You know, Sven, after a long stay at, you know, the Ritz Carlton, you know, the gold standard for what the hospitality industry about, you know, Pierre comes from the top hotel school in Switzerland. I mean, both of them have incredible stories. Vietnam, Belgium, you know, you name it. We won't go through that today. But Pierre was at Starwoods for several years, but they both came to healthcare. And we're going to talk today about their perspective on, we know healthcare is not the same as the hospitality industry as a hotel. What are the things we could learn? What are the sort of mistakes that some people make? These two folks are good people. They have got confidence. They know something. They've also got humility about what they don't know. So let me ask them first how they came to healthcare, because I think that's an important part of the stories, and we'll put some of their other comments in perspective. Sven, why don't you go first on that?
[00:01:32] Speaker C: All right, well, thank you for having me. This is going to be a very fun discussion.
So I didn't initially pursue healthcare. I didn't come out of my hospital experience that you heard about earlier, which was very significant, where I was paralyzed for a long time and then came home out of the hospital and said, like, oh, this is such an amazing industry, which I felt it was, but I didn't see a path into that.
It was several years later, actually, when I was in Detroit and actually had one industry in between hotels and healthcare, and that was working for the Detroit Institute of Arts as vice president of museum administration.
Henry Ford was opening the new Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital, and they approached me because they wanted to infuse hospitality into this new, brand new facility that had where a lot was riding on. And I was intrigued by it at first, but then I realized that I have to say yes to that because of my healthcare experience.
That's when I really then thought at first, like, I know nothing about healthcare. And then, like, oh, my gosh, I actually know a lot about healthcare, especially from the patient perspective. And I never looked back, so I really would have no interest in going back into the hotel industry. At this point, Pierre, well, for me.
[00:03:02] Speaker D: On a business standpoint, I always wanted to be in the hospitality world. Like you mentioned, I was with Starwood for many years, working with brand teams, designing experience like you're having here at this hotel. But then it became more personal. When my mom was diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia and I'm an only child living, they were in Europe and I was thousands of miles away. And for me, not being able to be there for her care or be there for my dad, who was the caregiver, I was really struggling, you know, for a few years, and it was probably one of the most difficult time for me. And, you know, this opportunity came up for me to join Elmhurst as their first chief experience officer. So that is my way, being thousands of miles away to care for her and be there for my dad. So many times when I see an elderly person working in the hallways, it always reminds me of either one of them. And that's why I made the switch.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Well, you know, poor Nell Buhlman here knows that I bring up Hegel's triad about once a day. And Hegel's triad was thesis, antithesis, synthesis, where you've got an idea and you got a counter idea, and then ultimately you try to put them together. So the thesis would be like, there were people like me, I was one of them, who were saying, healthcare is not like Disneyland or Disney World. It's not like a hotel. They're not coming here for a luxurious experience. They're coming here for, like, relief from their fears and suffering and so on. The antithesis were like, the reaction to that was like some people coming from outside healthcare, who I would edit down their comments to, like, these people are morons. They don't get. Things could be so much better than they are, and they just don't. They don't know what they're doing.
And then the idea of a synthesis where you put these things together, well, I would start by saying, well, who's right? The thesis antithesis? Or is there a synthesis that we're after here?
[00:05:19] Speaker D: You know, Pierre, well, you know, hospitality doesn't mean luxurious all the time or fun all the time, right? Like the quote, we're going back to basics, and hospitality means how you. How you make someone else feel. And that's what we bring to the healthcare world. Now, I would say that both industries have things to learn from each other.
The same way healthcare is caring for the caregivers. I think hospitality people are now, in their own ways, are starting to look at the well being of their staff. So it's back and forth, but it's mainly for how do we make people.
[00:05:56] Speaker C: Feel first, all three are true. I think we are war on.
I wouldn't say moron, so I didn't mean that. But I certainly was laying in my patient bed thinking about, like, how things could be different and how I compared and contrasted to what we taught people in the hospitality industry and how that could be very beneficial for patients that are going through that experience and how it actually can enhance that care and can enhance reducing the suffering and enhance healing.
Many, many examples of that. And when I then started in healthcare, we'll get into those examples. But when I started in healthcare, and I got a lot of people saying exactly that, like, what does hospital have to do with hospitality? The people are here, we're treating sick people. We don't have just guests that can pay a lot of money for a room. We treat everybody and all those things.
My response to that was, I think they deserve it more. They need that more. Because what we teach in hospitality is, like Pierre said, we make people feel good and somebody should feel good. When they check into a medical appointment, they should feel warmth from the person that is registering them and that we make eye contact with them. Checked into the hotel here.
They completely tailored their experience to my needs. I had a problem. I came back, she remembered my name. It was no problem, we'll fix it. And then it was easy for me, and I think we'll talk about that a little bit later, too. But that's the training that can be so beneficial. I think if you layer that over the clinical excellence and everything that we do so well in healthcare, and there can be a symbiotic relationship between the two.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Well, you know, one of the things I enjoy in life is like, you know, talking to people who don't have the same opinions or the same perspective as me, because you learn stuff and like, and I've been learning from you two, as well as our broader community here. But one new thing I've learned in the last year is that, like, the word ease, suffering is something we've been talking about here for a decade, and kindness and respect. Okay? I've sort of gotten my shtick around those things, and I really believe those things. But the word ease that we should be thinking about the ease of, what's that mean? Ease, what does it mean to you? And, like, why should I get the feeling it's something really important that I did not get until very, very recently?
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Always be a step ahead of the person to be proactive and to anticipate the needs. I think that's ease to me and to always know what that next step is and to help the person, whatever it is, to make that appointment, to connect them to the right person. Navigation, I think is so important that makes it easier for people to transact everything that's sort of out of that interaction in the hospital room or in the exam room. That's I think where we shine often. But as soon as I leave there, that's when it becomes hard.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I can see everyone here is thinking that is what I want.
Your take on me, the actual help.
[00:09:49] Speaker D: That we need to provide to our patients actually start the minute we need the help at home and something is coming up and we need to look for a provider and make the appointment and look for someone who takes care, insurance and all those things. And I think that's the part that is shocking to me. Coming from another country is it is actually super hard if you need to find a new doctor for something that it just coming up. It's not easy. You know, you go, you search and it's like we talked about this morning. Hopefully Amazon will help us one day. But that's the part for me that needs the most ease. Because to some point the minute you arrive at the facility there's a process. But before that, that's very hard.
[00:10:35] Speaker C: And it's reducing wait times, setting expectations that are realistic. In the hotel industry, we always talk about it is under promising and over delivering. So then you look like the hero in the end when you say, well, it's going to take 3 hours, but then it's done in an hour and a half. Think about eds that are overfilled and how long it takes to get great patients in a room, et cetera.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Well, you know, I mean, I actually feel pretty confident in our colleagues that like anything we actually set our mind to and focus on, we can improve on, we can make progress. But identifying there are things like ease and simplicity which frankly didn't seem urgent issues.
But I think we're in a time where they do seem like they're urgent issues, actually. When I visited Elmhurst Perry, tell them about what you have done with smells.
[00:11:41] Speaker D: No secret, I shamely stole it from my hospitality days.
You know, it was important for us to make sure that when you arrive, looking at the mindset that you're arriving at the hospital, that we could find a way to do something about that. So yeah, I remember that back in the days when I was working with the different brand teams we had a program, a send program that would diffuse certain smells in the lobby as soon as you arrive. One is helping for you to remember the experience, but two as also a therapeutic experience where it's supposed to calm you down depending on the scent you choose. So we did a pilot, and thanks to my CEO, my CEO sitting there, they gave me full support. We started in the lobby, and very quickly, not only patients enjoyed it, but our staff were asking for more. They were like, you know, it's calming us down also, and it's giving us energy. So we expanded from the main lobby to, you know, all the different elevator landings and, you know, and now we have it across the whole facility except the clinical areas. But it's. It's really helping not only the patients, but also our staff.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: And I actually, when I visited, it was very clear, talking to people that the personnel working there appreciated the change. And what it made clear to me is that we're in a time where people are scared, and they're using all five senses to assess whether they're safe. And helping people feel safe is a form of preventing emotional harm.
And as I said, I think that I never would have thought of that. You know, I. You know, and then, like, on food, I was one of the people who would say, food doesn't matter. It's, you know, it's the interactions and stuff like that. But you changed the way I thought about that issue. Well, I will never admit that I was wrong, but you added nuance to it. So, you know, for there probably a subset of people here who don't know about the stuff in the Wall Street Journal and so on.
[00:13:51] Speaker C: I love the people that were doubters, but it's not what healthcare is known to do. Right?
And it really stems from piggybacking on what pierre said with ascent and the enliven Ed Ritz Carlton. We talked about the Ritz Carlton experience enlivens the senses, instills well being, and fulfills even the expressed and unexpressed wishes. And it's for our guests. And so how do you do that in healthcare? Scent is a great example. Sound is a great example. What do you hear when you walk into a healthcare facility? And then taste probably is the most challenging to address in a healthcare facility. And we just. By listening to the voice of our patients, the voice of our customers. Seven years ago, we heard from our patients that they were disgusted with the food that we served them.
I can only say it as plainly as it was because they used some very harsh words to describe the food that they received. And what it came down to is that it overshadowed and it took away from the clinical excellence that we actually provided in our facilities. So you do some really good work, and then because of food, they say, I can possibly recommend that hospital because that experience was so bad. And then we went to work and through a, you know, we put all the stakeholders together, identified that we needed a position to oversee that for the health system. We have 21 hospitals. We serve over 10 million meals a year. 10 million. Imagine that, 10 million times the opportunity to delight or disgust somebody. So we were looking for the delight. And fast forward seven years. So we hired a Michelin star chef, Bruno Tisson, who then brought in an army of people that joined him and us to where we staffed the kitchen with people that come from the outside and that have a real passion for food, to make food delicious, partnering with the dietitians to make sure it's safe. And we follow all the processes and the protocols that we have to follow in healthcare, but to make it delicious. And we went from stacks of letters, and Michael Dowling loves to talk about that because he got those letters and how bad it was. And now he gets stacks of letters and how great the food is. And I talked to him, it was about a year ago. He said that he was visiting a patient in one of our hospitals, and he was asking how the care was, and he said, the care is great, but the food is amazing. Yeah, but tell me about the doctors and the nurses. Yeah, it was great. Can I tell you about the salmon I had? It was unbelievable. I can't believe that you're serving that in a hospital. So what we see now is that is such a surprise and delight. There's also something that we focused on in hotels that it, now it equals that great clinical experience that we give, and it gives patients something to look forward to on a daily basis, and it actually reduces their suffering. And because they look forward to that every single day. They look at patients, tell us, I look at the menu and I look at it all day thinking about what I'm going to order next. And I forgot about the pain I'm in. And it is part of the care. So food is care. And if you look at it that way, then it changes how important food is in healthcare.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Well, I feel like the food, putting a pillow under someone's head, it's not like that. This is a replacement for other ways of showing empathy and taking good care of people. But it's part of a picture of showing that we care and as opposed to like, we're just like generating rvus or something like that. And so it's not like a substitute for, but it's part of showing care.
And that is like the synthesis for me that's evolved as I've thought about what I've been learning from watching you and others over the last year or two. All right, so let me ask in my last couple questions you to give advice first to people who are like, who were like you, like, coming into healthcare from the outside, and what would you warn them are the dangers that they may, and not just from the hospitality industry, you know, from any kind of, you know, anything, like on a non healthcare industry, because there's a lot of people coming in because people feel like they want to shake things up and so on. So what warnings would you give someone who was coming in?
Why don't you go first?
[00:18:56] Speaker C: I actually do that quite a bit. I have people reach out from the hotel industry. I'm asking about how to enter healthcare. And the warning I always give is if you don't have something inside of you that wants to help people, and that especially if you don't have a personal healthcare experience that you can tie that to so that it becomes mission driven. Don't go into healthcare because he won't be successful. And I know a lot of people that have been very successful. I know some people that have not been successful because they thought about going in and forcing those principles of hospitality into healthcare. That doesn't work. I think you have to respect the industry, you have to respect the people and what it takes to become a physician and to be successful in that field. Like Stephen Covey said, seek first to understand before it to be understood, and then collaborate and then work together to change it. And not everybody can do that. There's a lot of people that come in, I have the good ideas. Healthcare needs this. Listen to what I say, and that doesn't work.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Your warnings?
[00:20:09] Speaker D: I have two. I would agree with Sven on finding that personal connection. To make sure, you know, we have to make remove the transactional side of the healthcare experience. So you need that personal connection. And second, I would say that you really need to be persistent.
You know, coming from a private industry where it's, you know, you design an experience and you get to roll it out. I think in healthcare you have to be ready to hit a few hurdles before. Before you can actually roll out something. So, yeah, I'd say that you need to be persistent in your pushing.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: What do you think the biggest opportunities for people working in the healthcare provider world or the health plan world to learn from folks like you. Coming from the hospitality industry, I know you were actively working on, you know, your hotel school, ECL from Las Lausanne, you know, educational programs for healthcare providers. What are the top one or two things that you think we should open ourselves up to?
[00:21:21] Speaker D: I think it's, you know, like I mentioned before, healthcare to me is, especially the US, healthcare is very transactional. It's, you know, you have a need, you go and you get what you came for. In hospitality, we always make it the delight. We always try to understand what you really want. We try to personalize and we think of all those things that we can do to make the experience different and personalized to you, because then you'll be like, oh, my God, you know, just. For example, I just went to a consult the other day and was a new patient in a. In the practice. The nurse who went through the vitals with me and all the questions to set me up as a new patient had a conversation with me and it was amazing. I texted my team. I was like, oh, my God, I want to bring this person back to Amherst. And there was no scripting, there was no. She just had a conversation with me, which I don't think happens a lot. So I would say try to forget about what is transactional and try to make it a more personal experience, the.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Relationship instead of the transaction. That seems obvious, but I'm glad you reminded me, Sven.
[00:22:43] Speaker C: I think something that we did in hotel industry, especially at Ritz Carlton, is the focus on staff selection, finding the right people. When you interview people, obviously the resume important, the credentials are important.
You know, we look for somebody that they impress you in two minutes, because sometimes that's how long it takes in an interaction with an employee. If they don't come across as warm and caring and friendly during that time, somebody you want to get care from, then it's not going to come later. You lose that window of opportunity.
When I started at Henry Ford in West Bloomfield, I remember our chief medical officer, doctor Muma, and when I shared the concept of hiring habitual smilers, he thought it was the greatest thing he's ever heard. And like, wow, he's like the top doctor in this hospital. And I just impressed him by something that's so simple that we do every single, every single day.
Also, I think the concept around on stage and offstage is so important.
Where we. When you're on stage, and unfortunately, in the hospital, for example, we're always on stage because there's very offensive, very few offstage areas.
Then you have to be professional.
I can tell you when I was in the hospital how often it happened. I was wheeled in my wheelchair from my room to the gym for PT. And the patient transporter stops. I'm in the chair and has a personal conversation with somebody and then continues.
I was not interested in what happened at the football game on Sunday, and it didn't even occur to them that there was a problem. So those things or talking in the elevator, you mentioned that earlier also in your talk. And lastly, I would say the concept around creating experiences that are tailored to the preferences of the individual, that's what it's kind of like the secret sauce of Ritz Carlton, to get to know the person on a personal level, know what their interests are, know what their hobbies are, what they're like, what the, you know things about their things, about their family, and then you can make them feel at home and known wherever they go within the organization.
Is Darren Dorkin in here?
Darren yesterday shared with me an example when we talked about Ritz Carlton, and he said he had an amazing experience at the Ritz Carlton in Kyoto, in Japan.
I opened the Ritz Carlton Osaka. He asked me if I was a Kyoto. There. Wasn't open yet at that point. But he went there and without even ordering something, they had the cocktail that he prefers exactly to his liking. And all the, with the, I forgot what it is. I'm not a cocktail drinker, but what it was. A manhattan. Correct.
Should know that, being in New York.
But he was blown away because, just because he stayed at a Ritz Carlton before and that information traveled with him and he felt like, they know me, I'm at home here. And think about that in healthcare, how we can change the experiences and how much we know about people. We know inside out, the medical record, but we don't keep track of all the other things that are important to make them feel better.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: That's a wrap. Thank you for joining us today and special thanks to our guests for sharing their time and insights. Stay tuned for our next episode, which will be released soon. In the meantime, visit our website where you'll find more information on the human experience and a lot more.
