A Story to Guide Us All

From time to time, I have opened a lecture or talk with a story I discovered on the Internet many years ago. It has served as my guiding force and helped me create my tag line for my medical consulting company. The story goes like this:

One evening, a health care executive sat reading his company's annual financial report. His young son was not amused. He was bored and wanted his dad's undivided attention. "I've got nothing to do!" he cried. The health care executive tore out the last page of the financial statements from the report. "Here", he said to his son. "Draw on the back of this for a while". His young,eager son grabbed the paper and off he went.
A few minutes later, the boy returned. Proudly, he showed his father the simple stick figure he had just drawn. The executive smiled, but he had hoped the drawing activity would have occupied more of his son's time. "What may I do next?" his son asked.
The father thought to himself. "A puzzle, my son likes to work on puzzles". He turned over his son's drawing to the complicated financial statement. "If I tear this into little pieces, can you put all the numbers back together for me?" he asked his son. His son was just as eager to please his father and agreed to the task. "This should take him at least an hour", the executive thought.
Soon after, his son returned with the page taped together. The executive was amazed. "How did you put all those numbers together so quickly?" he asked. "Simple", said the son. The young boy turned the page over to show the stick figure on the back."I just put the person back together, and those numbers took care of themselves."

How powerful a statement. If you take care of people, the financials will take care of themselves. This has been my company's tag line for years. This is the full embodiment of healthcare stewardship. We must take politics and profitability out of the equation to fix our broken national healthcare delivery system. It is my belief along with many others that we have to get back to taking care of people. I agree with the following: No measure, no manage; no manage, no margin; no margin, no mission. But at what expense? Have we lost are willingness to do the right thing for our fellow man? Are we that myopic a society to have allowed ourselves to focus on the margin and not on our patients in healthcare delivery? My tag line should become our national healthcare mantra. It isn't too late, or is it?
Dr. Dale