Thomas Zenty

We began to break up some of our faculty's activities along clinical administrative research, teaching, and service responsibilities.

Well, when you begin to parse that out,

it's not quite so easy because if someone's busy seeing patients, they don't have time to do their research or their teaching.

But at the same time, if you look at their clinical productivity and it's 9%, you know that there's something not quite right in that formula.

So by breaking it out, it made an enormous positive impact.

There are over 5.5 million people in the United States that work in hospitals, and I can assure you

that there isn't one who wakes up every morning looking to make a patient's life more difficult.

It's a very dedicated, committed group of people.

And the responsibility really resides with us to create the culture, provide the resources, do the things that we need to do to make hospitals a more effective, more efficient, high-quality, better outcomes environment, which is really what I think we're tasked with the responsibility of accomplishing, and not just today, but in the years to come.

We reward for meeting those metrics.

I get a lot of patient letters, a lot of patient emails, and a lot of patient visits.

The biggest complaint I hear about was the bill.

I get very few complaints about the clinical care.

Virtually everything is in what we do that's customer facing.

They love the care, they love the outcome.

99% of the complaints I get are around billing.

Why is that?

Well, for 100 some years, we've been focused toward not billing individuals, but by billing insurers.

And the problem is if you get a bill, it's totally unintelligible.

And the first thing it says on the top of the bill is, this is not a bill.