“Hi Dr. Raff,

I look forward, and am hopeful for, another well-orchestrated roll-out, just as you did with the rectal culture workflow.

Thank you for your professionalism and leadership!

KC”

Wow.

It has been a tough few months for all of us. Pandemic, social unrest, product shortages, political nihilism. It’s not the best time to be rolling out a major change in a necessary product line to our “client” offices. But the move to the exciting field of molecular microbiology was something that we had begun before the world had heard of COVID-19. Significant financial investments had been made. The administration wanted us to push on.

Our lab staff did a tremendous job of finding workarounds for supplies that proved absolutely impossible to obtain. Procedures that had been previously validated needed to be reanalyzed and revalidated to take into account changes in technique.

We devised new strategies for informing our offices about the new procedure, and the not insignificant changes in office workflow that would be needed. We made a video and emailed FAQs and asked the group’s nurse coordinator to schedule face-to-face training where possible. Hundreds of supply kits were sent via courier to each office and our IT team made the necessary changes to our ordering and reporting paradigms.

Of course, there were grumbles. Why this? Why now? Do we HAVE to? But we responded, “Yes you do!” in as nice and as polite and as firm a way as possible. We set a date for when the old test would no longer be orderable.

Over the course of seven days, we watched as the percentage of testing using the new method increased. When the cut-off day arrived we told IT to flip the switch.  As far as we were concerned the old method no longer existed.

We are now working on Phase 2 of our molecular microbiology project. That’s what prompted the email above from KC, the Practice Manager at one of our offices. I thanked him for the props and told him he had made my day.

And it’s true. A kind word, a word of support, a word of praise, can truly make my day.

What makes yours?

The above are the opinions of the author and not necessarily UroPartners LLC.

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