Many of you are familiar with author, speaker, and now climate activist, Seth Godin. He has been publishing short, creative blog posts every day for almost 20 years. Posts that make you pause and reflect. One of his recent posts was called “Who cares?” It piqued my curiosity. I paused and thought, “It’s true that many people don’t appear to care about the specific problems we see in healthcare, but Seth is surely right — someone does.”
Is that you?
I will be more specific, but first, what does it mean to care? 
What does it mean to care?
Well, when you care about something — particularly a problem or challenge — you probably think about it when you are driving, or maybe in the shower, or while working out. You ponder, reflect, and rack your brain to find a way to solve whatever that problem is.
Do you care about delivering the best health care possible?
With that in mind, here’s my question: Are you someone who cares about delivering the best care possible? Let me ask some follow up questions before you answer, “Of course I am!”
Change takes courage
Are you willing to advocate for changes at your organization that will make the best care possible? Because change always takes some amount of courage. Courage means being willing to take fresh ideas and present them to your executive peers, to circulate and win over colleagues with new methods and new approaches — because you care about your patients.
Now answer. Are you someone who cares?
Example — unwarranted clinical variation
Let's take the example of clinical variation. You know that unwarranted clinical variation means some fraction of your patients are not receiving the same quality of care or potentially receiving unnecessary care that they are going to have to pay for.
Do you care about that? Does that get your blood boiling?
If it does, maybe you are someone who cares.
Competing priorities
Alternatively, maybe you are thinking, “Well, yes, I care about that, but I have other priorities.”
Help me understand what is more important than delivering the best care possible.
If we offer you a lightweight approach to reducing unwarranted clinical variation that can be up and running in weeks, essentially pays for itself, and is proven to work, why would you not do that?
If your answer is, “I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t do that,” then we should talk.
You ARE someone who cares.
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