Years ago over dinner, a client who ran a large health plan (yes, I did some work on the dark side) suggested a quality of service measure that he wished he could have:

'Number of sleepless nights'

He was specifically focused on cancer patients that night and believed the business processes of his organization were slowing down the time between when a woman found a lump in her breast and when she knew, one way or the other, what that lump was and what it meant for her future.  That delay caused a lot of unnecessary sleepless nights and needed to be reduced.

No, he was not your stereotypical health plan executive.

As we move toward a world more focused on quality of care, and as we mature in our ability to measure, report and analyze multiple measures that tell us about the quality of care that we deliver to our patients, we would be wise to consider and think about time measures as well.

Anyone who has ever sat in the gate area waiting for news about when their delayed flight will take off knows that time matters a lot to a customer.  Anyone who has waited for that call back from the pediatrician on the sick kid or the lab result knows that waiting for an airplane is kid's play compared to health worries.

Free thought for the day...Find something in your practice, probably something unique to your specialty and the type of care that you provide, that has a time-based sensitivity for your patients.  Talk about it with your staff.  Even if you don't have objective numbers on your computer screen that tell you exactly how you are doing, take a stab at something that gives you a benchmark.  Then go to work making those sleepless nights, or frustrating hours, go down.