Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

Aase Family Holiday Greetings 2015

As Lisa and I finished our Lord of the Rings marathon with our youngest son John this New Year’s morning, we looked back with gratitude for the Lord’s many blessings on our family in the past year.

We’re particularly thankful that in this last week we had all of our descendants together to celebrate Christmas, and so I waited to do this retrospective until I could include photos from our Monday-afternoon family photo shoot. (Thanks Photos by Joe!) Here’s the whole Gang of 17:

Snowy photo

Our oldest daughter, Rachel, will celebrate her 30th birthday in two weeks, validating Gretchen Rubin’s observation, “The days are long but the years are short.” Rachel and her husband, Kyle Borg, are currently experiencing the first part of Rubin’s formulation, as their fifth child, Sylvia, arrived Oct. 15. What a great bunch they have:

Borg children

Kyle continues to serve as pastor of Winchester Reformed Presbyterian Church in Winchester, Kansas. The kids (Evelyn, Judah, Aletta, Mabel and Sylvia) have an idyllic life in this town of 500 which is about an hour from Kansas City. Lots of room to run and play, and a close-knit church family. We wish they lived nearer to us, but we’re thankful for FaceTime enabling us stay connected.

Our son Jacob and his wife Alexi live in New Berlin, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee), where Jacob works as a Physical Therapist at Froedert Hospital. They now have two sons, with Isaac Lee Aase joining the family on March 15. Big brother Graham, who just turned two, is a fully certified Minnesota sports fan:

Graham TwinsGraham Vikings

Jake and Family

Our middle daughters, Rebekah and Ruth, still live in St. Paul where they work as float pool nurses at Bethesda Hospital. They both appreciate the variety of assignments, and that they earn the same at 0.6 FTE as they formerly made in 0.9 FTE nursing home jobs, but that they frequently can pick up extra shifts.

They live within a few miles of the airport (MSP), so I had a few opportunities this year to stay with them before flights, or even to get together during a layover. And because they have some schedule flexibility, I was able to take them on one of my trips this year, to Boston, where we took a little extra time to hike the Freedom Trail…

Freedom Trail

… and to take a drive to Kennebunkport, Maine:

Coast of Maine

Joe is still at Minnesota State University, Mankato where he’s a member of the basketball team. Last season the Mavericks made the NCAA Division II tournament, and they’re currently 9-2 and ranked 25th in the country. Joe is planning to go to law school after graduation, and is thankful that because of basketball he’ll start that part of his education debt-free.

John is a high school junior attending Riverland Community College full-time through the Post-Secondary Education Options (PSEO) program. His four eldest siblings graduated high school with their AA degrees thanks to PSEO, and John plans to follow suit. He also is working part-time at the new Hardee’s just down the street.

Joe is on the left, and John on the right, in this photo of the Aase men…

Lee and Boys

…and here is Lisa with our young ladies:

Lisa and Girls

We’re also blessed with a wonderful church family at Trinity Presbyterian in Rochester, where I’m an elder and Lisa teaches Sunday School.

Lisa and Joe (with some help from John) spent a good part of the summer giving Old Main a new paint job and completing other exterior upgrades. It was a LOT of work, and it shows up nicely in this version of our family photo:

Wide Porch Aase Clan

Lisa hit another milestone this year, with John starting school at the community college: after 23 years of homeschooling, she is officially retired! She appreciates the freedom this gives her; when Sylvia was born she was able to go to Kansas for 9 days to help Rachel with the adjustments.

This has been a memorable year for me professionally, too. Highlights in our Mayo Clinic social media program include:

Here are some other Facebook photos and memories from 2015.

We have many hopes and plans for 2016, and we know there will be some surprises, too. From our family to yours, we wish you a blessed New Year!

NIghtime photo

P.S. To go further back in our Aase family memories and see how we’ve changed in the last nine years, check out these year-end posts from 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. 2013 was a pretty busy year in which I was occupied with this site, so I failed on the Christmas letter.

Social Media in Healthcare: Coming of Age

That’s the title of the presentation I’m giving today at the Ontario Hospital Association social media conference in Toronto.

I’m excited to announce the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, and to offer OHA Members a discounted rate on membership.

Here are my slides.

Why Uber Doesn’t Have a Loyalty Program

During my presentation in Wichita last Thursday night to the Kansas Society of Clinical Oncology, I showed excerpts from a video of Al Errato, the husband of one of our Mayo Clinic patients, which I had discussed in the post just before this one. (It’s also linked from Slide 27 below.)

One reason for showing the video was to emphasize how the advance of technology makes it much more cost-effective to capture moments and testimonials like these.

But during my conclusion (see Slide 66), I also tied Mr. Errato’s example back to one of the Five Tweetable Truths (which is something of a healthcare-specific distillation of my 35 Theses) I shared as a summary:

Creating a great patient experience is the best way to have positive social media buzz

In other words, the success of a social media “program” depends on the underlying reality of the patient or customer experience. If you’re providing good service, the offline word-of-mouth will be good, and you’ll likely be able to amplify it online. If you have quality and service issues, no “program” to encourage online buzz will be successful.

Back in my hotel room that night, I went online to Hotels.com to get a couple of rooms for Friday night, as my parents, Lisa and I were headed to Milwaukee for my grandson Graham’s second birthday. The site informed me that this rental would put me two nights closer to the 10 I needed for a free night’s stay.

As I headed to the hotel lobby the next morning, opening my iPhone app to get a ride to the airport via Uber, a question struck me:

Why doesn’t Uber have a loyalty program?

I had started using Uber late last spring based on a friend’s recommendation – or rather his use of the service for a ride on which I was a passenger. So then the next day I downloaded the app and used Uber myself for my ride back to the airport. I do recall getting some prompts to share my experience with friends, with some discount or credit involved for making the referral.

Since then I’ve used Uber at least a dozen times. I appreciate that:

  • The prices are lower
  • I don’t have to decide whether to give a 15 or 20 percent tip – it’s built in to the price
  • I don’t have to wonder whether the driver will take my credit card or demand cash after the ride’s conclusion
  • I can have the ride billed automatically to a stored credit card
  • I get the receipt via email almost immediately after the ride, and don’t have to worry about misplacing a paper receipt
  • I always get a clean ride with a courteous driver who has averaged at least 4.5 stars on a 5-point scale from those who’ve ridden previously, and
  • I don’t have risk bodily injury stepping into a busy street to hail a cab

On a recent trip I also experienced being able to split the fare with another passenger. No need for one of us to give the other cash and then mess with reimbursement headaches due to nonstandard documentation. We each got our half-price receipt via email.

I’ve become a regular customer, and yet I’ve never gotten an email that says, “Hey Lee, you’ve used Uber 7 times! With just 3 more you’ll qualify for a free ride!”

Why not? Because that would be a waste of money. I’m already committed. Why would Uber give me for free what I already think is a great value?

Uber doesn’t need a loyalty program because its service IS its loyalty program.

I’m glad Delta airlines has its Medallion loyalty program so I can get a few extra inches of legroom in Comfort+ seats at no extra cost, and that I can use accumulated miles for free trips.

And the Hotels.com free bonus night after buying 10 does give incentive to use that site regularly instead of splitting among Orbitz, Priceline, Kayak and the like. I’m not endorsing Hotels.com; I’m just saying that in a crowded marketplace with lots of similar options, a loyalty program can be a differentiator.

But now much better to provide service which is so clearly superior that a loyalty program would be wasteful?

Well done, Uber.

 

Two Mayo Clinic Testimonials

Earlier this week, I saw this video from Glenn Beck about his experience at Mayo Clinic:

Partway through, Mr. Beck talks about his conversation with a Mayo Clinic nurse, and how he was surprised to learn that what he was perceiving as being treated “like a king” was actually fairly representative of the experience of average patients. So here’s a video I shot with my Flip camera in our early days of the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, with the husband of a patient who had traveled from Connecticut:

I enjoy so much hearing these stories from people having their first experience at Mayo Clinic. They’re a great reminder of why we go to work each day.

 

Leading Change from the “Other” C-Suite (That’s Communications)

That’s the title of the presentation I’ll be giving in Washington, DC today along with CareHubs CEO Paul Speyser, for the annual conference of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, a.k.a. #SHSMD15. Yesterday we had our Social Media Residency at UC-Davis in Sacramento, and so as I write this, I’m at the airport in Detroit on the way to Washington, DC, having taken the Red-Eye from SFO to DTW last night.  If all goes well, I should be in DC by 9 or so.

I had an opportunity to preview some of what we’ll be discussing in our presentation in a podcast conversation with Stewart Gandolf, which he published last week. As I mentioned in the interview with Stewart, I think it’s been about a dozen years since I’ve spoken at this conference, back when my main job was media relations for Mayo Clinic. It’s fun to consider all that’s changed since then, and yet how our work now with the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media is consistent with what we were doing in 2003, but also with more than 150 years of Mayo Clinic history.

Here’s the slide deck Paul and I will be using:

We’ll be talking about how we’ve collaborated to create social networking capacity through an owned platform for our Center for Social Media, and how we’re now applying those capabilities for patient education, patient communities, blogs and news delivery.

While many of the slides contain hyperlinks to some of our WordPress-based sites and communities, here are a few initiatives I’d like to particularly emphasize:

Here are a couple of our sites that will have significantly redesigned looks in the next few weeks:

If you haven’t yet signed up, please take advantage of our free Basic Membership in the Mayo Clinic Social Media Health Network.

Finally, here are links to some of the books we mentioned, which have influenced our thinking:

I look forward to a good discussion.