Work Process

'Welcome.You Don't Have Mail.'

By Joseph V. Robbins

Hospital staff gets a refresher course in old-fashioned, person-to-person communications

Do not send. Do not forward. Step away from the keyboard. Who could blame the staff at St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center, Paterson, N.J., for feeling a bit disconnected one Friday this summer? Interim President and CEO Richard Birrer, M.D., declared June 20 an e-mail-free day. Communication within the hospital could only take place in old-fashioned ways: voice to voice on the telephone, or, even more unsettling for some, face to face.

Reaction to the edict was mixed. "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.' " 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."

Even St. Joseph's technology guru, CIO Jim Cavanaugh,calls the exercise a success. "We got mixed feedback, as you can imagine. People admitted it was a challenge, but the goal was achieved," he says. "This was not designed as an assault on technology, but to draw people's attention to the way we become dependent on e-mail." The IT staff used their freed-up time to donate blood.

Not that Cavanaugh advocates banning e-mails indefinitely. "Doing it for one day didn't have a tremendous impact, but for more than a day, I think it would certainly be a challenge," he says.

So what's next? Birrer is considering instituting a voicemail-free day and maybe even an e-mail-free period on a weekly basis, if only for a few hours at a time rather than an entire day. "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."

This article 1st appeared in the November 2003 issue of HHN Magazine.

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