TODD EVANS: Most patients don't feel like guests. They feel like a unit of measure that's being shuttled from the inpatient admission process through to the discharge process, two rather unpleasant terms that I've never had used when I checked into a luxury hotel experience. So I would say there's a remarkable lack of orientation in the sense that there are common objectives with people that enter the doors of each respective industry. 

People are looking for experiences. Health care is looking for an outcome. Those are remarkably different. And when you talk to somebody, you're going to get a completely different definition. 

So I think the first thing is a crisis of culture in making people feel like they're guests of a health care system that wants to keep them healthy as opposed to see them when they're sick and attempt to repair them. Second, they want to be treated as individuals and have an experience that's highly personalized where they have a first name and a last name that goes beyond the wristband. I don't wear wristbands, generally, when I go to a hotel, and I have a remarkably positive experience. 

So a lot of these things, I think, have to do with culture. That's where they start. And they end with personalization that's memorable, repeatable, and have a high level of quality. 

Culture. The first thing is understanding each other. And I think in all walks of life this is the human condition, understanding how to relate to one another. Whether it's an industry difference, geographic difference, the first thing is do we understand each other, is our orientation something where we can find common points of interest, common points of value creation. 

And in this instance, I think hospitality and its attentiveness to the individual has an enormous amount to offer to health care, which is in a state of enormous flux. The industry has been rigid, followed generally unspoken but conventional processes and expectations of itself. 

And now it's a reorientation. Who's the customer? Well, it's not the health care professional. The customer is actually a guest, if you will, that's entering the system and hoping to come out better than they did when they walked in. There's some commonality. They want to come out refreshed, rested, positive. It's a different kind of orientation. 

And so I think the first thing is starting with culture. Second is solid communication of the objective. And the third is orienting with a common purpose towards what's the focus of our energy and what's the desired outcome of the experience. 

When you take a hard look at what's happening in health care in terms of we are trying to reorient-- at least the US health care system-- towards a position of keeping people healthy. And in that instance, the forum that the Institute is creating where we can achieve a consortia of interests across the health care value chain that meet the hospitality-- excuse me, hospitality industry in terms of who is a customer, what is the customer, what's the experience they're looking for and how can we collaboratively achieve the input of value that makes high-performing hospitality segments what they are. Embed that into the culture and the experience of the guest that's entering the health care value chain. 

And if we can achieve that through collaboratives, and pilot programs, and the ability to experiment in set piece environments and then scale it and make it repeatable, we've done something noble and good for US health care generally. And ultimately, it's the power of the consortia and the open thinking that's going to open doors to breaking convention really. 

And that's our biggest problem. We have all the pieces we need. It's really about how you throw him up in the air, see them come down, put them back together, turn the cube, and say, there is the answer. We don't need a whole bunch of brand-new innovations. We need an innovation in our attitude and our vision. 

I think the skill that's necessary is understanding that historically in health we've had a lot of inch-wide, mile-deep expertise that's very necessary in terms of how to solve a very explicit point problem. But when you're attacking a systemic incentive model, when you're attacking an industry culture, you're going to have to have broader vision and an openness towards new thinking that really looks at the problem from seven or eight different angles, not just one, and is attacking it with a dozen different solutions that have to amalgamate themselves into a whole solution as opposed to a series of solutions that move from department to department. 

So it's really that integrated approach towards solving the problem. And that begins with properly identifying the problem. And I think design thinking in terms of how we look at health and the new stakeholder, which is the consumer, who has a powerful vote in what the health care experience is going to be, what they're willing to pay, how transparent it should be. What is success? How do they define it, as opposed to a quality metric that's something that hangs on the board of operations? 

Big, big gap there. And I think the generation that we have today that uses the empowerment of mobile technology, the convenience of transparency and empowerment that it brings to make decisions, that's something that's not customarily found in health care from one end to the other. And I mean that from the patient experience. 

So these are things that I think generationally are empowered by folks that are going to come out of this program and that are going to be, I would say, catalyzed by the foundation and it's its collaborative approach towards finding new ways to deliver care.