Vision without action is merely a dream.

Action without vision just passes the time.

Vision with action can change the world.

– Nelson Mandela (sometimes attributed to Joel Barker)

I’m getting excited for this week.  The stage is getting lit.  The Solutions Gallery is being set up.  It’s all coming together folks.

I don’t have too much to say for this blog post given all the prep we’ve been engaged in at Cerner for this year’s Cerner Health Conference (CHC).  For those who aren’t familiar, every year Cerner hosts the Cerner Health Conference in the beautiful City of Fountains and brings together the best and brightest in the Digital Healthcare industry.  From providers to health system leaders to excited Cerner associates (that’s me!), everyone gets together for 4 awesome days to discuss the latest and greatest our organizations are delivering.

But the star of the conference every year is someone who is not always explicitly in the room: the patient.  Every single person at a session, keynote, or workshop is there to do one thing and one thing alone: improve healthcare for patients across the globe.

Which is why I was so moved this weekend by a short film from the Cleveland Clinic that I watched.  Every new Cleveland Clinic employee watches this video and is given a “Patients First” pin when they join.  If you have the time, I highly encourage you to watch it.  Tip: have tissues on hand.  By watching the video, wearing the pins, and always keeping the patient at the center of everything they do, employees at the Cleveland Clinic, from custodial staff to CMIO, have transformed it from an average institution to one of the nation’s best hospitals across every conceivable metric.

Lots of research shows that psychological distance has a big impact on organizational function.  The further removed companies are from the humans that they serve, the worse they perform.  This has often been cited as the reason for business scandals such as the Ford Pinto’s deadly fuel tanks and Impax delegating drug pricing to Martin Shkreli. It also is used as a potential explanation for Amazon’s incredible success in an competitive retail landscape: when you are earth’s most customer-obsessed company, it’s pretty easy to deliver value and beat the competition.  As a former Amazonian, I can tell you that the “Customer Obsession” value made it pretty easy to make decisions because there was always a right answer: whatever the customer needed.

So going into CHC18 I am most excited to bring this client focus to bear.  As a healthcare vendor, it is incredibly easy for Cerner associates like me to have psychological distance from the providers and patients we impact every day.  Events like CHC18 are an incredibly important reminder that at the end of the day there are real people counting on us to deliver in a big way.

Also, just please watch the video.  It is truly one of my favorite things I have watched this past year.  And that includes the much-buzzed-about A Star is Born remake.