Outside Innovation

23 Months of Community Activism Paid Off Today!

MaineHealth Required to Provide 24x7 Urgent Care on the Boothbay Peninsula

For those of you who have been following our saga of a healthcare system run amok and ignoring the needs of its customers on the coast of Maine, we finally received some good news!

The citizens of the Boothbay peninsula breathed a sigh of relief today when Mary Mayhew, Maine’s Commissioner of Health & Human Services acknowledged the need for MaineHealth to provide 24-hour 7 day/week Urgent Care on the Boothbay peninsula as a Condition in her approval of the merger of St. Andrews Hospital in Boothbay Harbor and Miles Memorial in Damariscotta to form Lincoln County Healthcare. “I specifically acknowledge the comments…regarding the provision of urgent care in the area,” Commissioner Mayhew wrote, “I have determined that the ordinary economic development of health care for the Boothbay Region would be adversely affected and this specific application would have to be denied if the applicant who provided emergency care was not required to maintain an appropriate urgent care presence. The commenters have made this need clear and I have approved including a condition requiring 24 x 7 urgent care services.

“The members of this community have fought hard for 23 months to regain 24 hr. emergency care for our peninsula,” said Patty Seybold, Board President of the Boothbay Region Health & Wellness Foundation. “We lobbied in Augusta, we met with the Governor and the Attorney General, we were finally given the opportunity to have a public hearing to provide testimony to the DHHS (but only after our ER was shut down and our hospital merged). We are gratified that Commissioner Mayhew listened to the voices of the customers—our year round population, our large retiree population, and our multi-generational seasonal residents—and agreed with us that 24-hour urgent care is required on our peninsula.” 

The members of the Wellness Foundation are proud that we were able to get this job done on behalf of our four communities: Southport, Boothbay Harbor, Boothbay, and Edgecomb. We now have a proven track record in our role as consumer advocates and health and wellness mentors. We have lots more to do!

Our first priority is more skilled nursing beds on the peninsula for recuperation, rehab, and end of life care. We will continue to work closely with LincolnHealth to replenish the number of skilled nursing beds on our peninsula, and to ensure that LincolnHealth management and board have an accurate picture of what is needed in our communities as we engage with them in their 5-year strategic planning process.

We will continue to empower community members to take increased control over their own health & wellness with programs like the Awesome Seniors’ Walk Free at the Y program, offered in conjunction with the Boothbay Region YMCA. We will continue to identify unmet needs—local mental health services, reduction of substance abuse, local cancer treatment, tick-borne disease screening, senior support network, community/senior center, life sciences’ careers for our young people—and to support the creation of affordable, local services to meet those needs.

 

Customer Journey Mapping—Seybold Style

We’ve had a lot of demand for Customer Journey Mapping recently. Perhaps it’s the customer experience flavor du jour. But we’re happy that so many companies are paying renewed attention to the quality of the end-to-end customer experience they deliver.

We’ve been mapping customer experiences for over 25 years with clients in many different industries—way before the term Customer Journey Mapping was invented. What’s good about a single Customer Journey Map is that it represents the end-to-end experience you want to provide from the first moment a customer engages with your brand until their last breath (or until they no longer need you). What’s challenging about creating a single end-to-end Customer Journey is that every organization has a lot of different types of customers in different contexts at different stages. And different customers in different contexts need and care about different things. In this first article about our approach to Customer Journey Mapping, we explain how you can capture the requirements of your key target customer segments using Customer Scenario Maps and then combine the key patterns from those scenarios to create an end-to-end Customer Journey Map that accurately reflects all of their needs.

Customer Journey Mapping
How to Ensure that Your Customer Experience Journey Map Reflects Your Customers’ Scenarios
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, May 23, 2014

 

Why the U.S. Government Thinks It Can Search Peoples’ Electronic Communications Located in EU Data Centers

Long-time client and friend, Donald Callahan, sent us his timely analysis of a U.S. Federal Court case involving Microsoft and the attempt of the U.S. government to obtain a customer’s email from Microsoft’s Data Center in Dublin. Donald’s full analysis appeared in the blog post entitled US Law in European Datacenters: Microsoft in Federal Court on May 13^th, 2014. Donald knew we’d be interested in this development because of what we’ve written about the impact of cloud location and privacy in “Where Are Your Clouds? Location Matters.”  “I know that you are sensitive to the issue about data location in the Cloud(s) and the legal jurisdiction that customers want to apply,” Donald wrote.  “You might be interested in my analysis of this ruling, as a contribution to your thinking.” Here are some excerpts from Donald’s great analysis. In particular, Donald looks at the logic in the ruling that rejected Microsoft’s appeal as setting important precedent on three major questions:

1. Does Data Location Matter?
2. Does the American Stored Communications Act require documents to be produced, even if they don’t reside in the U.S.?
3. Where can a search be conducted?

Here are the highlights of Donald Callahan’s analysis:

The Way to Wellville: A Contest to “Produce Health” in the U.S.

I have known and admired Esther Dyson for a long time. I’ve also been confronted with the urgent need to improve healthcare in my rural community. So I was intrigued to discover that Esther has created an organization (HICCup) dedicated to producing better health in communities. Not healthcare. Health. There’s a big difference. We spend $2.9 billion in the U.S. each year on “healthcare.” Yet our health outcomes are mediocre compared to the rest of the world and getting worse. The biggest issue we are facing in the U.S. is NOT what kind of healthcare we need and who should pay for it. Rather, it’s how can we produce better health in every household and community by focusing on the largely social and behavioral determinants of health.

As an angel investor in over 40 mobile, internet, and e-health companies, Esther Dyson has been following the “Quantified Self” movement. Many of us—particularly Baby Boomers—track our calories, workouts, blood pressure, and heart rates on our mobile devices and look at graphs to see how we’re doing in meeting our personal health goals.

What if, Esther posits, there were a “Quantified Community” movement, in which communities keep track of the initiatives in their schools, churches, and recreational facilities that actually produce better health outcomes for residents—outcomes like less diabetes, less cancer, fewer teen pregnancies, fewer suicides, as well as outcomes like lower per capita healthcare costs, and fewer hospital admissions. What if we could visualize this data and the interactions between what we’re doing in our communities and how each community is producing better health?

Featured Case Studies

We love writing case studies! That’s one way we learn what works and what doesn’t and why. Here are a few of our favorites for you to enjoy this month:

• Culture Nurtures Innovation at Luck Stone
  How Values-Based Leadership Fosters Innovation in a 90-Year Old Company
  by Patricia Seybold, April 25, 2014
• Why Alaska Airlines Considers Mobile Development a Core Competency
  Speed Up Improvements in Customer Experience through Mobile
  by Patricia Seybold, February 21, 2013
• The Evolution of African Rural University
  Co-Designed by Its Faculty, Students, and End-Customers (People the Grads Will Serve)
  by Patricia Seybold, April 11, 2013
• Agilent’s Virtuous Circle of Personalization
  Customer Experience, Content Strategy, and Marketing Automation Create a Machine that Drives Customer Engagement
  by Susan Aldrich, August 7, 2013
• BuzzCar—Peer-to-Peer Car Rental
  Building a Platform for Participation for a “Peers Inc.” Business Model
  by Patricia Seybold, October 11, 2012
• Why the Healthcare.gov Insurance Exchange Bombed
  Policy Makers Insisted on a Customer-Unfriendly Workflow
  by Patricia Seybold, November 7, 2013

Do you have a good story you’d like us to write? Let us know.