THANK YOU!!! Jay, I cannot thank you enough for an outstanding job. I honestly do not believe that a kick-off meeting that is meant to inspire and help people reconnect to purpose could have gone better. I was truly honored to work closely with you throughout the two days. You are incredible at what you do. Thank you for all you are doing to make a difference in health care delivery. I look forward to working with you again and wish you well.

John Looney
Director, Public Relations & Service Excellence, Jordan Hospital

Dear Jay,

I wanted to thank you for a wonderful day here at St. Luke’s Hospital.  Your talks were excellent and I believe will give further momentum to our service excellence efforts.  In speaking to physician participants, they were all very complementary of the material that you presented and felt it was pertinent.

It is our intention to go over the material that you presented in detail and develop action plans to implement much of what you suggested.  I personally feel that your talks were invaluable and certainly will help us in our journey to service excellence.                                               

James R. LaMorgese, M.D.
VP/Chief Medical Officer, St. Luke’s Hospital/Iowa Health System

Hi Jay,

Thank you again for coming to speak to us.  You and Gail both were "astonishing"!  That is my new favorite word!  I was a believer without ever having heard you. And I am convinced now, more than ever, that what we discussed is not optional for us any more.  It is just the right thing to do for patients, families and our employees and physicians.  Why work somewhere if the environment is horrible??  And that takes work to maintain too!!

We continue to get great feedback from our managers and directors about what a great seminar it was.  So I hope the two days ignited a spark or starts a brush fire here! 

Take care and thanks again so much for what you and Gail added to our lives.  I can tell you are an awesome physician.  I hope they realize how lucky they are in CA to have you!  Have a great week.

Patti Monczewski
Associate Administrator , Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center

Dr. Kaplan--

Thank you for your awesome presentations, the time you spent with our leadership sharing your observations and recommendations and for copying the tools for me before you left Friday.  I have received great feedback on your visit.  Here are a couple of comments:

• Dr. Kaplan was all you said he would be, and more! I'm looking forward to working further with him as we bring our ED through these rough waters. His fresh and candid look at the department was much needed.  (Dr. Coppola, Medical Director ED) 
• I just want to thank you for bringing us Dr. Kaplan. His message was terrific in terms of content, and delivery. He is very credible in as much as he does this work on a regular basis, and he has pulled himself up by the bootstraps.  The message was right in line w/ what we are trying to do organizationally, and his ability to make it personal to the docs and to the ED staff was wonderful.  Again, thanks very much for bringing this to us, I am confident it will help. (Fran Bonardi, VP Patient Care Services)

Sherry Strammiello
Director, Quality/Risk Management , Lawrence & Memorial Hospital

Hi Dr. Kaplan

Wanted to thank you again for the outstanding job you did during your visit to Carroll Hospital Center .  Everyone, and I mean everyone, really enjoyed your presentation and walked away with a renewed vision for patient satisfaction. You have created quite a buzz - or as your daughter would say - you "rocked" this place.  The feedback from our medical staff also was extremely positive -  "Excellents" across the board there! Now, that's a true accomplishment.

It was a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully we'll be working together again sometime in the future.

Take care and I'll talk to you soon.  Thanks again.

Teresa A. Fletcher
Director of Marketing and Public Relations, Carroll Hospital Center

Dear Dr. Kaplan,

I did not want to go home tonight until I wrote you a note of thanks for such a great presentation to our colleagues, our Medical Executive Committee and our ED Doctors. They were all really excited about the information that you provided. We have some difficult work to be done but I believe that you gave us some terrific ideas and you told us to have fun.  As one person put it "I really wish he ran our ED". I was thinking throughout the discussion that I would love to work on your team and I am not a nurse! It has been a pleasure working with you on your trip here to St. Mary Medical Center. I certainly hope we can continue to work with you as you are a truly motivating, energizing, honest and caring person. Thanks again for a great day at St. Mary!

Julie Cannan-Siegle
Clinical Nutrition Manager, St. Mary Medical Center

Good morning, Jay -

I hope that this week finds you busy with meaningful and worthwhile work!  I wanted to take the time to thank you for passing along your knowledge and for the caring attitude that you have for the people who work in your hospital.  It was truly a moment of inspiration for me, capturing the heart of what we do.  Thank you for also making us laugh…too much intensity "sucks the life" out of the work we do and there is so much reality to our every day in healthcare, that a moment of levity is really valued!  Thank you for sharing, for inspiring and for doing what you do! Take care and best wishes for continued success.  I look forward to seeing you again. Kind regards,

Terry Humphrey
Organizational Effectiveness

Jay:

Thank you for the great presentations at our regional conferences.  Your work with our customers gave them a multitude of tools to use to further engage their physicians in the culture of patient satisfaction.  Our customers raved about the quality of the information you provide and the spirit with which it was given.

Thank you again for your great work.  I hope our paths cross again soon.

Melvin F. Hall, Ph.D.
President & CEO, Press Ganey Associates, Inc.

Regarding your presentation to CHE Leadership Conference April 27, 2004 - Jay - I can't say enough about your presentation to our leaders - it was exactly what we needed.  You energized folks, called us to personally reflect on our own journeys, and left us with some very important challenges and 'to dos' - all accomplished with a true sense of style, wisdom and understanding.  Thank you for spending the morning with us.  And thank you for sharing your gift. Sincerely,

Diane S. Denny
Vice President, Quality & Patient Safety, Catholic Health East

Dear Dr.  Kaplan:

On behalf of the medical staff of Jefferson Regional Medical Center , I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to you for your presentation at our annual Medical Staff Day on May 6, 2004 .  The feedback following the event has been very positive.

Your presentation was timely and meaningful, and all who attended will benefit from your message; we hope they will incorporate many of your suggestions into their individual practices.  We are certain you helped “light the fires” necessary to improve service excellence at Jefferson Regional Medical Center .

Thank you again for your invaluable presentation. Sincerely,

William R. Sims, M.D.
President, Medical Staff, Jefferson Regional Medical Center

Thank you for the enlightening presentation that you gave us at our 4^th Annual OSF Physician Leadership Conference in Delavan , WI on September 19, 2002 .  We have received numerous positive comments from our medical and administrative staff on your presentations.  I think our attendees found it refreshing to have not only the information on medical leadership but also to have the more personal side with surviving stress added.  It left me with a sense of completeness in this process.  I do feel others felt the same way.  It was an honor to meet you and we greatly appreciate you taking the time to present to our OSF physicians on these valuable topics.  Hopefully our paths will cross again. Sincerely,

Robert S. White MD, FAAFP
Assistant Administrator for Medical Services, OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center

Dear Dr. Kaplan,

Thank you for the talk you gave Monday morning.  The thoughts you shared were thought provoking and especially helpful to me at this time as I am struggling to decide which discipline of medicine to choose as a career.  I am really grateful.

In the middle of your presentation, you showed a list of nine or ten questions to consider when thinking about personal goals.  I think the first of them asked what you would want to be known for now and what two things you would want to add to that list one year from now.  Those questions really got me thinking about what I want to remember about myself in this process and throughout my life.  Your entire talk inspired me to think about how I can make the world a better place for other people, using the qualities I possess and can further develop.  It was a perfect way to begin the year.

Thank you again.  I hope you have a safe trip home. Sincerely,

Cora Sterling
4^th Year Medical Student, Temple University Medical School

Jay,

Thanks very much for presenting at our SMG Hospitalist yearly retreat. Improving patient satisfaction was high on our list of goals this coming year and your presentation and guidance is very appreciated to help get us on our way. We found your presentation to be very entertaining and engaging and yet clearly focused on how important patient satisfaction is to physicians and staff. The physicians who participated all told us they were very motivated by your talk and many told me it was the best conference they had attended in years.  I feel your presence helped elevate the urgency and importance of this topic to a level where I'm finding it now easy to get physicians to participate in our patient and staff satisfaction initiatives. We feel that with your help we will hit our targets of improving our patient satisfaction scores to the 75% of Press Ganey scoring. Thank you again.

David Gallagher MD
SMG Hospitalist Program Medical Director

Jay,

I want to thank you once again for the time you spent with us on March 14th!  Our docs really appreciated the time they had with you and in fact just this morning our chief of Cardiology stopped me to talk about the ongoing impact of your talk.   I want to be sure you realize the impact that you had here- but also the impact of the work.  I know life in the healthcare business is can be crazy, but you have some special gifts and talents to share- and I am thankful that you fit time in your schedule to share your wisdom and mentor others.

Again- thank you so very much- I wish you all the best!

Kristine K.S. White RN, BSN, MBA
Vice President, Patient Affairs, Spectrum Health

What’s Right in Health Care, Studer Group National Conference June 2006 Comments from Participants:

• Best of the show!!
• Great information and fun too!
• WOW! Dr Kaplan gets what this is all about
• Thank you for the clear prescriptive to-dos
• I am leaving with tasks I can implement
• Fabulous audience involvement and sharing of experiences
• Simply awesome
• Your personalization made it easier to relate and understand the message
• You WOW’d us all
• Great tools for working simple but working effectively to change for the better
• I have written down so many ideas to bring back to my organization.
• I have heard Dr Kaplan before but still I am WOW’d

Dr. Kaplan,

I want to thank for the inspirational presentations you made during your two days at The Children's Hospital in Colorado .  Your presentations gave our physicians and staff easy-to-implement tools that can be used immediately. You re-energized all of us to become personally accountable for providing service excellence to the children and families that we serve.

We have had a great deal of positive feedback from the 800+ staff members, physicians, and leaders who had the privilege of hearing you speak.  Here are just a few examples:

·     “This is the best presentation I’ve heard during my 23 years in healthcare; it reminded me of why I’m here.””

·     “Dr. Kaplan was superb at delivering a meaningful message that staff and physicians could relate to.”

·     “Every staff member needs to hear this message; what are the plans for bringing Dr. Kaplan back?”

Your sense of humor, passion, and, of course, your background as an ED physician, created quite a stir here at The Children’s Hospital.  You received a perfect "5" on every single survey from all seven of your presentations--amazing!   

I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to visit us here in Denver .  I hope you’ll come back soon. Sincerely,

Michele Young, Director
The Children’s Hospital

Jay,

I wish to reiterate my appreciation for your presentations at the recent Studer Group conference in Atlanta .  Is it possible for you to share with me the poem you composed and read at your presentation on Getting Better Faster?

I am about to embark on the process of presenting some of these concepts to our group of urgent care physicians, many of whom are as cynical and suspicious as I was before having the advantage of attending the conference. I will be looking for all the help I can get in getting the support and cooperation of our physicians. Thanks again.