Hospital Network

Challenge

Business process improvement and change management have a direct connection to any change initiative. Hospital Network, a major hospital network in New York City, serves over a quarter of a million patients annually. The leadership team knew that to continue to deliver exceptional care, they had to improve their patient experience, cut costs, and standardize business practices across all network sites.

Approach

The organization’s mission is to serve its patients efficiently. To do so they needed to improve the working environment, increase employee engagement, and improve its CAHPS scores. We conducted a full business process assessment in the two areas of concern. We began with C-suite level and senior management discussions to assess current organizational effectiveness.

We collaborated with the Hospital Network teams to compile the general operational goals and develop a strategy to execute the goals as well as created task milestones, a project timeline, and success measurements. We discussed and agreed on the required resources for the project, a budget, and personnel. The project team partnered with key stakeholders and leadership to help plan and disburse project tasks.

Strategizing the solution required us to combine all the information collected and develop a Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) that was a reference throughout the project. The SIP outlined the activities and decisions necessary to execute the desired goals, including the resources needed, assumptions, short and long-term outcomes, roles and responsibilities of team members, and the budget.

Their goal was to raise their CAHPS scores that directly measured their patient experience and, ultimately, financial reimbursements from payers. We measured our success by comparing the current process time to the desired process time to reduce the patient wait time to 50% from the past process.

We analyzed all pertinent internal data: job descriptions, historical CAHPS scores, employee data, internal reporting, patient onsite turnover, standardized workflows, and call center intake and escalation process. The research conducted was on:

Industry best practices
Private practice best practices
Up and coming technologies
New integrated patient file repositories
Press Gainey CAHPS survey questionnaire
Common call center best practices
Areas of opportunity

Staffing rubric at selected test sites, we conducted onsite observations of the day-to-day office operations, administered individual discovery interviews, organized focus groups, and ideation sessions, and ran patient perception interviews.

As a result, we were able to produce patient and nursing staff journey maps, identify software gaps, review potential upgrades or build-out opportunities, and gather business requirements.

We collaborated with site managers, as well as nursing and front-line staff during the discovery process and data collection. Our goal was to ensure each person felt heard and could contribute to this important initiative.

We drove a weekly senior management status meeting and reported on initial findings. We also presented additional document requests and discussed the next steps. This exercise aided us in managing expectations, talking through possible solutions, and prioritizing project details.