The hierarchical model, a burden

Jordi Varela

Editor

The current hierarchical model is slowing the good progress of companies and, to support this statement, I will stick to the evidence, through two different sources, one Japanese-Dutch, the iceberg of ignorance, and the other English, the cost of silence.

The iceberg of ignorance

In 1989, a consultant, Sydney Yoshida, carried out a study (reported in a Corporate Rebels post), for Casonic, a Japanese car company, and found that the real problems of the production lines, known by 100% of the operators, are captured by 74% of the team leaders, but only by 9% of the intermediate managers and by a scant 4% of the executive directors, who end up making the budgetary and investment decisions of the production chain. This surprising phenomenon of isolation and impoverishment of organizations was called the iceberg of ignorance. 

The power of a call

Andrés Fontalba

In recent months, we have changed the way we behave as a society. And although many of the changes continue, some of them have already been consolidated and are here to stay. One of these changes has been the use of telephone calls for remote follow-up of patients who cannot attend the consultation. With a phone call, you can share specific information, such as the result of a diagnostic test, or attend to a specific request from a patient, but one of the most powerful effects that these calls have produced is that, if they are made in an empathetic way, they can relieve loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

Joining the trend of patient goal-oriented electronic health record

Tino Martí
 

Primary care in our country is in a good situation regarding the use of electronic medical records. The digitization of medical records began at the end of the last century and was fully deployed in the first decade of this. Such is the progress of the clinical stations used today that they are already crying out for a technological, functional, and usability update, but changing the system is complicated and very expensive, so it's easy to expect that change will only occur when the technological version will no longer justify itself.

Default options in healthcare

Pedro Rey

Although we talked extensively about the shared clinical decision between doctor and patient, many decisions made in health care are not chosen fully consciously. Among these "decisions", one powerful example is the power of default options: those established protocols that indicate what will be done if no other decision is actively made.