You have to just start doing it
Lessons in doing not talking from Lithuania - less goals and more actions
Last week, Lithuania announced it is the first country to eliminate imports of Russian gas. On Thursday, I watched an interview with Rokas Masiulis, CEO of LitGrid. The BBC journalist asked what advice he had for other countries trying to achieve the same goal:
“You have to just start doing it.”
I love this answer. Mr Masiulis is a clearly a doer, not a talker. His words speak of actions, not aims.
Our world is full of lofty goals and ambitions. We express the solutions to our biggest challenges in targets and timeframes. Think of the competitive braggadocio amongst companies and governments over dates to achieve climate milestones. “Carbon neutral by 2025” or “No more gas guzzlers by 2030.”
The NHS suffers from this approach more than any other institution. The latest manifestation is the elective care recovery plan. To pick one headline:
“Deliver around 30% more elective activity by 2024/25 than before the pandemic, after accounting for the impact of an improved care offer.”
Contrast this with “just start”:
- 22 words versus just 7
- No mention of action - there are 6 bullets in the NHS statement, none of them specify any action
- Our Lithuanian friend leaves no margin for doubt. Do something, no excuses. The big tough NHS goal includes the words “after accounting for...” I have been a professional accountant for over 40 years. That statement allows for any amount of fudging and fiddling with the figures when it comes to measuring genuine progress towards the goal.
Here at Triscribe, we try to approach things in the same spirit as our Baltic cousins. Medication data in NHS hospitals is fragmented across hundreds of systems. Incompatible, unlinked data held in well defended resource starved silos.
Yet NHS people capture that same data through untold hours of hard work, friction, and frustration. Its a rich and complex source of insight, nuanced to reflect many clinical views and experiences.
We could wait for interoperability standards or the completion of multiple local and national data projects. The federated data platform, which is about to be tendered, is the latest in a long line.
Or we could just get started. It still takes time and patience, but at least we make progress. Triscribe is the only software that combines data from more than one EPMA system. Now analyse data from four. We combine and compare data from pharmacy stock systems as well.
We do this every day. We also calculate bed days every day. I believe no-one else does that either.
How can we build on these foundations to support your team? What’s the next step we can work on together with the NHS? Please let us know by comment on this post or by email: kenny@triscribe.net