IHI Keynote Examines the Role of Social Capital in Healthcare
By Jay Kumar
In their keynote address Tuesday at the 2024 IHI Forum, outgoing Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) CEO Kedar Mate, MD, and Thomas Lee, MD, chief medical officer of Press Ganey, discussed the importance of social capital in healthcare.
The idea is to build up social connections with patients, staff and co-workers, which then leads to improved trust and performance.
“We are becoming more and more disconnected from one another and finding it harder to hear each other, but within this community of improvers, we have leaned hard into deepening human relationships,” said Mate. “At IHI Forums like this one all over the world, there has been an unofficial ‘track’ in the program featuring sessions on kindness, community, and connection—a steady, persistent undercurrent about leaning into human relationship.”
Held in Orlando, Florida, the IHI Forum is in its 36th year and features 175 learning sessions led by 470 presenters on a range of topics including health equity, patient and workforce safety, digital healthcare, and leadership. The event has 3,000 attendees this year.
Lee, who has a book on the topic scheduled for release next month, said social capital is about changing behavioral norms to reflect our values.
“We’re going to make respect like hand hygiene,” he said. “We are going to treat everyone with respect.”
Social capital involves groups of people behaving like teams through safety huddles, managers rounding on people reporting to them, and colleagues saying “yes” to each other without knowing the details.
He pointed out the example of the Mayo Clinic, where the norms are such that clinicians answer pages immediately, which isn’t the case in most other organizations. The expectation wasn’t enforced with punishment, however.
“The enforcement mechanism was social,” Lee said. “These norms lead patients to trust caregivers more.”
You can’t buy social capital, he noted. “You can get money from the outside. No one can give you teamwork and trust,” Lee added. “Money cannot produce the things we’re talking about here.”
Mate concurred, noting that “social capital can’t be bought or sold, it has to be made.”
It all starts by building connections and those behavioral norms. “Norms develop around you, even if you don’t realize it,” said Lee. “We have to build connections and make the connections stronger.”
Lee recommended weekly audits to ensure that everyone on staff feels included in the norms. These are changes that can occur quickly, he noted.
“The real action does not happen in the C-suite,” Lee said. “It happens on the front lines.”