Can Banks Learn from Hospital Transparency?
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Hospitals and banks share some key qualities. Both rely on the utmost confidence and trust of their customers to be successful. Both have a vested interest in maintaining that high level confidence, despite any negative customer experiences. Both make their share of mistakes. Hospital errors mean infections, inaccurate diagnoses, and accidents. And banks face theft of data and funds via wide-ranging fraud.
The real question is how an institution decides to respond to and address any negative event. Some visionary hospitals are changing the way they deal with negative events in the interest of continuously improving patient care. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is one of the people leading the charge.
Levy's wildly popular blog, Running a Hospital, candidly discusses and publicizes negative patient outcomes in the interest of ultimately improving BIDMC's patient care. (Hear a recent interview with WBUR here).
The stated goal of this transparency is ambitious—eliminate preventable medical errors in four years. Some of the strategies BIDMC is using to drive toward this goal were flat-out unthinkable only a few years ago.
- The CEO's blog openly talks about mistakes at the hospital. Here is a snipet from a post in response to a surgical procedure performed on the wrong leg of a patient.
- Beth Israel's website updates key safety metrics and compares BIDMC's performance to other hospitals.
This kind of transparency underscores the commitment to patient safety and well-being. I say banks should take a page out of Beth Israel's playbook. The better the transparency, the more likely customers will trust your institution. And trust is essential in times of economic uncertainty.
Instead of covering up the true cost of fraud, banks and other financial institutions could use scorecards and publicize fraud data for the benefit of the industry. Fraudsters are committed, organized and are sharing resources more than ever.
The better the transparency and willingness of banks to collaborate in the fight against fraud, the more successful fraud prevention efforts will be in reducing this unnecessary cost of business.
What if banks stood up and said ”We'll eliminate preventable fraud within 4 years? Transparency is a growing theme in government and the private sector. Can transparency translate to loss prevention in financial services? Is your bank willing to be more open and transparent about fraud?