Business Change Management

Given today's extremely competitive atmosphere, how can hospitals find a meaningful point of difference? In markets where they're pretty much the same, how can they compete? Answer: the patient experience. And what is often the first experience a patient has with a hospital? The telephone call center.

Given today's extremely competitive atmosphere, how can hospitals find a meaningful point of difference? In markets where they're pretty much the same, how can they compete? Answer: the patient experience. And what is often the first experience a patient has with a hospital? The telephone call center.

Can playing games really help you get serious results in healthcare? A resounding yes!, says Andrea Simon, Ph.D., President/Founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC), in her insightful article how playing games can generate new, innovative ideas, recently published in Becker's Hospital Review.

Tap Leading Influencers from Hospitals, Digital Businesses & Other Industries To Address Short-Term & Long-Term Changes, Challenges & Predictions To Keep Savvy Readers In The Know

Tap Leading Influencers from Hospitals, Digital Businesses & Other Industries To Address Short-Term & Long-Term Changes, Challenges & Predictions To Keep Savvy Readers In The Know

This is an exciting time for Stamford Hospital. We’re in the midst of building a brand-new facility, and we are very fortunate to be in a financial situation where we are able to do this.

Creating a new hospital opened the door to a new, more innovative organizational culture

What we realized during this time of expansion is that this is a great opportunity to examine our current processes and look at how we can improve safety, optimize the patient experience and increase the efficiency of our staff.

We also saw an equally important opportunity to create and implement an innovative, more efficient work-flow redesign. So in many ways, from the way it looks to the way it functions, the new Stamford Hospital really will be new.

Transitioning from one healthcare facility to the next led to an examination of the overall patient experience

To successfully carry out these improvements and keep us on track, we established several goals early on in the process.

First, we developed a comprehensive, interdepartmental implementation plan for the transition to the new facility. Next, we used the new design, along with our guiding principles, to identify tactics, interdependencies, deliverables, responsibilities and timelines to meet key project milestones. And last but not least, we identified important organizational rituals and events that needed to continue to be part of the new hospital’s culture, and also planned how to safeguard that culture during the transition.

Lean Six Sigma processes helped hospital leadership understand healthcare customers' needs and ways to bring about increased satisfaction

Throughout our process of determining how to improve our current workflow, we have been using many of the Lean Six Sigma processes—management tools for setting objectives, collecting data, and analyzing results in order to reduce costs, eliminate waste, understand customer needs, increase customer satisfaction and enhance performance. Specifically at Stamford Hospital, these processes have revealed ways we can better serve our patients, follow protocols and improve the way we operate.

In fact, members of our Lean Six Sigma team played an instrumental part in the initial design of the new building. The team will now shift from Lean Facility Design to Lean Process Design, where multi-disciplinary teams will assess our current process flows, design ideal future ones, and identify gaps in optimizing the patient experience.

How to truly achieve hospital innovation? Involve your entire healthcare staff and welcome their input

As I wrote in my previous blog, we’ll be heavily engaging Stamford Hospital staff in all of our process-evaluation work. They are the ones who often have the best ideas on how to improve the patient experience. I firmly believe that if you listen to them, if you bring them into a room with experts on process and workflow and the Lean theories, it can significantly help you improve everything you do as a healthcare organization.

Change may be hard, but in Stamford Hospital’s case, change is going great!

The information contained in this blog represents the personal views of the contributor, and is not intended to reflect the opinions or position of any other contributor or organization.

Andrew (Andy) Simon, Partner at Simon Associates Management Consultants and highly-experienced entrepreneur, knows what he’s talking about in his recent article in ExpertBeacon, "Skills and techniques that will help you be successful at work." With several decades of accomplishments to draw upon, in both the corporate and start-up worlds, Andy has some sage advice worth noting for anyone embarking on a professional career.

“Diving into the business world is something that many people do at some point when they’re young and then their careers take them down a variety of paths,” Andy explains. "But there are some solid pieces of advice that can be helpful to almost any 20-something or 30-something that should make any career easier and more rewarding." Want to know the keys to success?

Here they are, from a successful entrepreneur and businessman who's been there:

Andrew (Andy) Simon, Partner at Simon Associates Management Consultants and highly-experienced entrepreneur, knows what he’s talking about in his recent article in ExpertBeacon, "Skills and techniques that will help you be successful at work." With several decades of accomplishments to draw upon, in both the corporate and start-up worlds, Andy has some sage advice worth noting for anyone embarking on a professional career.

They say the only constant thing in life is change. And wow, is this a time of change, especially in healthcare. Medical insurance is changing. Demographics are changing. Physicians’ practices are changing. Anything and everything remotely related to the healthcare industry, it seems, is changing.

As President and Founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants, Andrea Simon, Ph.D. works with healthcare providers to help them become more innovative. Inevitably, they ask her to make this often-arduous change journey easier to implement. In response, Dr. Simon created a "cheat sheet" which subsequently became the article, "10 considerations for a more innovative hospital culture," recently published by Fierce Healthcare.

Why Games are Important: Most people realize that the yearly school budget process is serious work. Too often, there is too little money, too many funding requirements and more demand than available funds. Fortunately, one very successful and productive way to facilitate, improve and move the budget process along is the use of games. The literature on games suggests that meaningful play and/or serious games add significant value to many decision-making processes, including budgeting.

"Physicians need to engage more." I hear this in almost every healthcare organization I work with.

And almost without fail, the talk is about what doctors need to do to engage. Clearly, from the health system’s point of view, it’s all about what doctors are not doing.