Business Change Management

In my previous blog, I talked about "leakage," the term used in healthcare business development to describe when primary care physicians refer patients to providers outside their system, rather than staying within their network.

What exactly is “patient leakage”?

Leakage is one of those terms that just never has a good connotation. In healthcare business development, it refers to patient business that is lost, that escapes, that you believe you should have gotten but that “leaks” and goes elsewhere.

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.

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.

"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.

“We’ve employed these doctors but they act like they're still in private practice…”

It’s more than frustrating to work hard to align a practice into a health system only to see its referrals going to a competitor, or its practice patterns not meeting the patients’ needs.

Only 60% of men have a primary care physician. On average, men die 5 to 10 years earlier than women.

In my previous blog post, I discussed how to capture the essence of an organization and then turn that into the brand story–something that differentiates it in a way that resonates with the target audience it wants to attract.

Simon Associates Management Consultants does a lot of work with clients that are in an early growth stage. A little while back, we attended the International Travel Goods Show for one of our clients, Cabeau. Cabeau is a relatively new company in the comfort travel arena, making products designed to make traveling more comfortable, including a variety of travel pillows.