Situation
Health care systems have opportunities to eliminate waste and improve quality that enhances both margin and the patient experience.
Managers should have access to internal processes and systems to lean their operations and reinforce a learning environment around efficiency and waste reduction.
Destination Health offers an Internal Consulting Group to facilitate these actions.
Background
In a model staffed by external consultants, external resources are always available to review operations and look for standardization opportunities.
The work of our ICG was to effect change from inside the health system, making it easy and accessible to requisition support resources for operations review and process standardization.
Execution
• In its early phases, working with ICG meant that managers could requisition resources confidentially to lean their services so they became incentivized to use them without fear that results would be used against them.
• Coupled with strong guidelines prohibiting the use of external consultants, the scope of capabilities included strategic market analysis and support. This produced ROI that supported margin enhancement and business development.
• ICG played a major role in defining and applying standardized efficiency measures – like staffing models – across the whole system so elements like staffing effectiveness were approached from a system perspective.
• ICG became a talent incubator for early career analysts with exceptional discipline and skills in lean, Six Sigma, data analytics and project management.
Results
Projects are now approached with budgets and work plans.
The staff uses timesheets to allocate their work to projects with the discipline of an external resource.
All projects are measured against ROI metrics to ensure value is created and sustained.