Praise also goes to the large health-resource center, open to the public, which has medical books aimed at laypeople and computers linked to health-related Web sites. The medical library where doctors do their research is adjacent to the resource center and is open to the public, so it's possible to find patients and visitors sitting next to doctors, leafing through medical journals. And though state regulations require too many shots and grooming procedures to make it feasible for patients to receive visits from their pets, Griffin has brought a half dozen or so dogs like Charlie up to code to soak up patients' surplus affection.
Patients point out that they are constantly being bombarded by unexpected acts of kindness. "I ran into someone from our environmental [housekeeping] staff today wheeling a patient down the hall," says Werdal. "She had seen him sitting there, so she just left her work, took over, and brought him to where he needed to go. Every employee of this hospital is considered a caregiver, whether they're processing bills in accounting or cleaning labs."
Most of the resistance to Griffin's openness with information has long since faded among the medical staff. "A lot of doctors thought that letting patients see their charts would lead to lawsuits," says Dr. Kenneth Schwartz, Griffin's medical director. "But we haven't had a single bad experience that's come out of it." Werdal recalls the time a patient was due in one of the labs for an echocardiogram but didn't feel well enough to be moved. "The nurse in the lab just decided to wheel the machine down to his room and do it there, even though no one had ever done that before," she says. "She didn't feel she had to ask my or anyone's permission, and I like that."
Charmel and the rest of his team refuse to stand still. Though its reputation for sheer pleasantness is attracting a growing number of patients from outside the immediate community, Griffin is aiming for a national market by establishing niche services within the hospital. One of those is a comprehensive pain- and headache-treatment center, in which, among other things, tiny pumps are surgically implanted next to patients' spines to provide a steady, measured flow of narcotics. Another is a hyperbaric wound-treatment center, where patients are placed in high-pressure, high-oxygen tanks that speed the healing of difficult wounds. Perhaps most remarkably, Griffin has even managed to construct an intensive-care unit that provides virtually all the same patient-wish-list items, including private rooms that are only slightly less hotel-like than the ordinary ones. To keep patients accessible to visitors without restricting doctors' ability to rush in for emergencies, for example, each room provides a door at opposite ends: one that opens onto a nurses' station and the other opening into a lounge area from which family and friends can enter anytime they wish, day or night.
In the view of Charmel and his team, such relentlessness in continuing to drive change through every aspect of Griffin's world is not overkill. It's a fundamental requirement, the alternative being an inevitable backsliding into compromise and convention. In Charmel's eyes, there is no middle ground to transformation: you either take it to a wild extreme and never stop pushing the envelope, or you fail altogether.
Griffin's managers are also looking to boost revenues by turning some of the hospital's practices into products. Last year Griffin formally absorbed Planetree--a seminal-but-failing consultancy that promoted health-care ideas like those developed at Griffin--by acquiring its debts, and the hospital now plans to quickly implement Planetree's agenda. Michael Gaeta, a former alternative-health-care consultant whom Charmel has put in charge of Planetree, says he's already begun aggressively promoting the organization's services to other hospitals in the United States and even around the world. With a $100,000 marketing budget--up from Planetree's previous allocation of a few hundred dollars for photocopying--Gaeta has produced slick brochures and videos and is constantly leading delegations of visiting hospital staffers around Griffin. In the first six months after the acquisition, Gaeta signed up four new hospitals as Planetree affiliates, each of which paid $20,000 for the first year of membership and then $15,000 a year thereafter. Griffin has also started selling how-to videos to other hospitals, such as one on how to set up a volunteer-based room-service program, which sells for $300.
What's next? Charmel won't speculate on more distant plans, but one Planetree consultant notes that when she travels with some of the Griffin crew, they often end up noting, in a half-joking way, that airports sure could use some humanizing. "But," she quickly adds, "there's still a lot of work left to do in health care."
David H. Freedman is a contributing writer at Inc.
