CRA Inc

25 Nov 03 @ 3:12 pm

Email Ban Redux

We alerted you recently to a UK-based company’s decision to ban internal email in support of its customer service strategy. It seems our description of this—as an Emerging Case Study—was spot on.

The November issue of Health & Hospital Networks reports that the Interim President and CEO of St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, NJ, Richard Birrer, M.D., “declared June 20 an e-mail free day.”

bq. Many of the employees said, ‘Wow, what a great opportunity for me to get out on the patient floor,’ Birrer recalls. Others said, ‘What am I going to do?’ I thought to myself, ‘Maybe you need a different job.’

bq. As a service business, health care is all about people, Birrer says. If we lose that through our use of technology, we’re not serving our customer.

bq. The whole idea is to go through a paradigm shift where we reach out to our service constituency, Birrer says. The platform I’ve established is ‘Back to the Basics, Back to the Bedside,’ and though it’s still too soon to see the full impact of this, I think most of us get the point.

As many of you can probably guess, we believe that this is exactly the right call…and would classify it as a convincing decision in support of St. Joseph’s strategy. We’re sure that we’ll see more companies following this example, and will keep you posted when we do.

You can visit the article in its entirety here: ‘Welcome. You Don’t Have Mail.’

Thanks to Ellen K. for the article.

posted in category(s): Points of Interest