Favorite snippets among many gems:
This one about how patients have raised the bar of expectations beyond just walking out alive:
"The Quarterly: Does that level of transparency also change how you think about competition?
Toby Cosgrove: Yes, and that brings us to the third seismic shift in health care. When I first started as a cardiac surgeon, 20 percent of the patients died. Success and quality were judged by whether the patient walked out or got carried out. Now, it’s quite different—nearly everyone survives. Now patients judge us in the same way they would judge a restaurant or a hotel: on the experience they have here. That experience has a physical, clinical, and emotional component. They’ll form their opinions and they will talk to people. I think we really have to address the quality of the experience, because patients expect it, and it is an opportunity to improve their emotional well being, which clearly has an influence on the speed of their recovery."
This one about putting your energy where it can make a difference:
"The Quarterly: To wrap up, what challenges keep you up at night?
Toby Cosgrove: Well, there are things you can control and things you can’t. I can’t really consider it a challenge if there’s nothing I can do about it. For example, I don’t have much capacity to deal with reimbursement from the government, so I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it. The things that I do have control over—the culture of the organization, a few strategic decisions, and probably most important, the selection of people—I do worry about. It’s not very hard to decide if people are bright enough to fill a role, but if they don’t have the cultural fit or the work ethic, they just won’t last here."
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