Tribes Demand Care Value

Can building tribes be a catalyst for improving medical care value?

To Seth Godin our Tribes are what connect us to ideas that we find important.

What value we place on our medical care is determined by the stakeholders of our care. Stakeholders in our care are the individuals and groups of people organized as entities or otherwise who stand to benefit from our medical improvement or be somehow penalized by our medical deterioration.

Who are the stakeholders? There are direct stakeholders and indirect stakeholders, people who stand to gain or lose directly or indirectly by the results of medical care.

Identifying the stakeholder in medical care need not be more complex than distinguishing the various social relationships of the person to whom care services are delivered.

For example, a single thirty-five year-old man, who is a printer at a regional printing company will have, among other stakeholders in his care his employer, the printing company with which he has an employer-employee relationship.

In that relationship, when his medical care results are beneficial to him they also benefit his employer since the company gets a more productive printer. Conversely, when medical care service outcomes are poor to him, the printing company also suffers from lost productivity resulting in direct revenue losses for the company.

We must make the idea of stakeholders in an individual person's care sticky and viral. I agree with Seth Godin here that beyond good ideas those concepts that matter most to us are spread by a tribal contagion.

Seth's talk at TED that I have included with this post can inspire medical care service workers interested in quality improvement through paradigm shift.