Ask questions from the beginning
Here’s a model you can follow. Put your curiosity into action by conducting interdepartmental interviews between your lab and the hospital you’ll be serving. It’s a great way to ensure new relationships start strong, as Dr. Julia Dahl, CEO and Medical Director for Mosaic Prime, shows us.
A few years ago, Dr. Dahl and her team were responding to a request for proposal (RFP) from a new hospital group. Intent on winning the business, they proactively set up interviews with the chairperson of each department at the hospital. Their goal was to genuinely understand the hospital’s needs and design a pathology service to meet those needs.
So they asked each and every hospital department chair a series of top-level, blank-slate questions, such as:
- If you could design a pathology service yourself, what would it look like?
- What do you value most from your partners in pathology?
- What frustrates you most about them?
- What type of responsiveness are you looking for in a pathology service?
- What is your greatest hope for your relationship with pathology?
The answers to these questions served as a baseline for the type of pathology service Dr. Dahl and her team would build for the hospital. Shortly after the initial interviews, they followed up with inquiries about process and workflow.
“It was important for me that they understand who we are, as pathologists and as service providers. I wanted them to know that we were going to engage in a relationship with them, and not just as physicians. We wanted to know what the workflow was like for their teams.”