Noteworthy happenings

The famous Metropolitan Opera has announced that they are going to use a dynamic pricing model for tickets based on demand for better seats.

Airlines introducing cuddle class: innovation in the economy class seating.

Hotel's trying to spin off their restaurants, well at least separate them from the hotel restaurant stigma.

The future: using video game technology in you shopping cart.

Enchanted Art of Disney Cruise

I've blogged about this before here, but I like the idea so much I wanted to show it again - now it full production mode.  What I like most is that it is more than just a new monitor with an animation on it, if it ended there it would just be a TV with a motion sensor on it.  The exciting part is the interaction that can take place in the game.

Assorted Links

Robot waiters taking over:  here and here

Low fare, pay per use hotels:  here

Mass producing real hand painted art: here

Hotels using social media as quality assurance tool: here

Good example of a service "stage" Disney style: here  

Posted E.R. wait times: MountainStar Health Care

I just returned from a trip to my home state of Utah and I noticed these new billboards from a health care company MountainStar HealthCare.  I stopped and took a picture of one:

According to their website, the numbers on the left of each of the billboard is the wait time as defined by:

... the time it takes to see a qualified medical professional, defined as a Doctor of Medicine (MD), Doctor of Osteopathy (DO), Physician Assistant (PA) or Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner (ARNP). 

ER wait times represent a four-hour rolling average updated every 30 minutes, and is defined as the time of patient arrival until the time the patient is greeted by a qualified medical professional. Patients are triaged at arrival and are then seen by a qualified medical professional in priority order based on their presenting complaint and reason for visit.

National average wait time is one hour, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HCA hospitals strive to beat the national average.

I found these billboards pretty interesting because just a week before we had dinner with a friend and her family in Montreal and we discussed that the typical ER wait in Canada was several (7 or 8) hours long.  They saw a similar sign during a recent trip to Florida and were impressed with short wait time in the US.

I think the fact that the hospitals have seemed to be able to really focus on shortening wait time is great, but except for impressing Canadians, I'm a bit uncertain about why they have spent so much money to display the stats on a billboard. Is there really a lot of choosing going on as you decide which ER to go to?  If you have a life or limb threatening illness or injury, do you first ask yourself "hmmm, now which hospital will probably have a shorter wait time"?  Or do you just go to the closest one?  They also post the wait time online here and have an iPhone app to check wait times here - do they expect people to check these as they travel to the ER? 

MountainStar is competing in a market dominated by Inter-Mountain Health Care (IHC) one of the largest health care providers in the country, and so they have a TV campaign with the premise that "bigger is not always better" directly attacking IHC's size. The ER wait time billboard campaign seems to be using their operational capabilities as a marketing ploy (which I think is pretty cool), but I wonder if the low wait times due to excess capacity or low demand as opposed to just smart patient processing.  The fact that they are calling out IHC and trying to actively compete for patients makes me think that they have more of a capacity / demand problem then a unique operational capability (maybe I'm wrong).

If the campaigns are successful and the hospitals start to see more ER patients, will the wait time remain low? If not, will the billboards stay up? Also, a statistic is less impressive in isolation, i.e. I want a billboard that shows the current size of the queue, the percentage of occupied beds, the ratio of patients to doctors, the average number patients per hour, the standard deviation of the wait times, etc.I also want to know what the nearest competitor is doing on the the same metrics for comparison.  But, alas, I am never happy and I am a nerd.

What do you think of the ER wait time billboards?

Service Innovation: Technology on your plate

The blog Experience Lab recently posted about the London Restaurant Inamo.  Although I can't say I've been, it sound like a cool place.  From Experience Lab:

 Inamo is a restaurant where “the control of the dining experience” is placed in the diners’ hands. Instead of customers being given a traditional paper menu and ordering with a waiter or waitress, they use an “interactive ordering system” to browse and select what they want to eat. 

 The menu is projected onto the table and is controlled using a trackpad on the right side of the table...

One of the best parts is that when you are choosing different options from the menu an image of the dish is projected onto your plate, which helps you get an idea of what it will look like. This is also useful if you want to show your fellow diners what you’re going to order.

Check out the video from the Wall Street Journal on Inamo as well.  As the video points out, it is a bit gimmicky, but it certainly adds to the experience of the meal. 

 

RFID's on your pants: Walmart takes the leap

The Wall Street Journal reported that WalMart is starting to put RFID "tags" on individual pairs of jeans and underwear:

Starting next month, the retailer will place removable "smart tags" on individual garments that can be read by a hand-held scanner. Wal-Mart workers will be able to quickly learn, for instance, which size of Wrangler jeans is missing, with the aim of ensuring shelves are optimally stocked and inventory tightly watched. If successful, the radio-frequency ID tags will be rolled out on other products at Wal-Mart's more than 3,750 U.S. stores.

"This ability to wave the wand and have a sense of all the products that are on the floor or in the back room in seconds is something that we feel can really transform our business," said Raul Vazquez, the executive in charge of Wal-Mart stores in the western U.S.

The article points out that there are potential privacy issues as well, but the final paragraph leaves us nerdy tech geek operations management folk begging for more:

Proponents, meanwhile, have high hopes for expanded use in the future. Beyond more-efficient recalls and loss prevention, RFID tags could get rid of checkout lines.

"We are going to see contactless checkouts with mobile phones or kiosks, and we will see new ways to interact, such as being able to find out whether other sizes and colors are available while trying something on in a dressing room," said Bill Hardgrave, head of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, which is funded in part by Wal-Mart. "That is where the magic is going to happen. But that's all years away."

Years away? Maybe.  We have had RFID technology for a long time and retailers have just now figured out how to make it affordable to use on individual SKUs.  The next stage maybe further still.

Technology to improve service - Cleveland Clinic Edition

 
Cleveland Clinic has been well known for some time as progressive in terms of customer experience, something that sets them apart from many health care providers. Recently I ran into this video clip (you may have to watch a short advisement before you get to the actual report):




 
I particularly like the pitch into the segment where the reported says that a visit to the hospital can be "an intimidating place when you're sick and you're scared." At first blush, it is not clear why a patient tracking system could put someone at ease during a hospital stay. However, I see 2 things that the GPS system can do to improve service delivery:

 

1. It tracks how long a customer has been waiting in specific rooms.
   
   With this data, the hospital can improve scheduling and staffing in order to reduce the wait time. Not all wait times are created equal , and often the most annoying are those waiting around in a cold, sterile room in a hospital gown waiting for the doctor to arrive. This system will give the administrators a better idea of what the true capacity is under different levels of staffing.
   
   
   
   
2. It indicates which rooms could be filled or need attention.
   
   In many businesses, the constraint is often the physical space need to perform the service. For example, restaurants are interested in table turns per night, and hotels are interested in occupancy percentage. With this new data, the hospital will be able to track occupancy to a degree never before realized. If the process constraint becomes the examination rooms, they can put efforts into turning rooms more quickly in order to see more patients.
   
   

 
These two points should lead to a reduced wait time for patients. Still, I'm unsure how that can reduce my anxiety. Perhaps there could also be some psychological benefit of knowing that the hospital is tracking where I am and I won't be forgotten about.


 
Can you see any other benefits to the GPS tracking system?


 
This is probably a large investment to have this "airport control tower"; does the value justify the cost? I wonder how they track an improvement in patient satisfaction or patient thru put to justify its costs.