The business of running a hospital is increasingly complicated. Hospitals are in need of best practices and sources of competitive advantage. KSA brings the experience and expertise in the development of new and redesigned operational processes to allow health care organizations to maximize their full potential and achieve their goals of program/market presence, superior customer service, impeccable quality, improved efficiency and effective asset utilization. We integrate skills in clinical program planning, technology planning and facility planning to deliver innovative solutions that are practical, implementable and infused with the organizational understanding and support for needed change.
Strategic Operational Visioning
Transforming the business of patient care requires a fundamental shift in mindset from “business as usual.” KSA facilitates the dialogue with key stakeholders and senior leadership to determine and express, at the strategic level, the future operating vision. The vision sets the direction for operations by highlighting the key drivers of change and establishing principles to guide the transformation going forward. It provides line of sight for reaching a higher level of performance, while communicating a compelling case for change within the organization itself.
Key outcomes include:
- Establishing the framework that serves as the operational link to strategic objectives by providing stakeholders with a common view and vocabulary of all relevant processes. Sets the overall tone to guide the detailed operational planning and process design. (Note: Deliverables may include a series of statements describing the ideal future state and/or high-level operating models/“generic” workflows that describe the future state.)
- Aligning with key metrics that assist the organization in recognizing the reality of its current state and tracking progress over time.
- Ensuring agreement between and buy-in from those accountable for the successful execution of any operational plan/change—physicians, administration and staff—including establishing an appropriate organizational/governance model with the authority to implement and sustain the required changes.
Process Assessment and Design
Achieving significant business and/or clinical process change requires that an organization go far beyond high-level visioning into the detailed design of new or the redesign of existing workflows. KSA’s well-tested methodology utilizes a collaborative process and incorporates best practices to enable effective management and continuous enhancement of organizational performance via its processes. Major emphasis includes:
- Conducting a diagnostic assessment to analyze current business and clinical processes, understanding existing issues and pain points, identifying the gaps between the current state of operations and the desired future state and prioritizing processes for redesign
- Focusing on designing entirely new workflows or making major changes to existing processes—includes detailed flowcharts with descriptive narratives—aimed at achieving the strategic operating vision, including eliminating waste, achieving consistent processes, improving customer service and eliminating unnecessary costs
- Providing performance standards used to clearly express expectations for operations going forward
- Identifying enabling technologies, equipment, human resources/skills, facilities and support services required to achieve the future state
We strive to ensure that clients achieve leadership in their markets and constantly improve via operational excellence. We use appropriate tools to identify the key levers for improving performance in a given situation.
Process Outcome Management
Altering the operating model is a necessary step to optimizing the potential of any health care environment; however, it is not the end. In order for the organization to know that it has actually realized its performance objectives, there needs to be a focus on measuring performance, whether it is cost savings, revenue enhancements, quality improvements, human resources development or customer satisfaction. Performance measurement objectives include:
- Identifying a balanced set of key performance indicators (metrics) to provide quantifiable insight into processes
- Creating the capability to identify further operating model improvement opportunities by detecting variability in processes and aligning disjointed processes into seamless procedures
- Integrating process measurement activities with other organizational measurement and reporting efforts such as demonstrating value, benchmarking, planning and forecasting and mandatory quality reporting
Operational planning is used to change business and clinical processes, organizational structure and technology after taking into account existing investments, process priorities and change management implications.
Process Governance (i.e., “Center of Excellence”)
Although it is important to establish efficient processes at any given point in time, the ability to ensure ongoing process improvement is even more critical to achieving long-term strategic objectives. Organizations must establish a robust framework for governing how processes will be discovered, documented, monitored, optimized and deployed to the enterprise. Process governance is most effective when an internal team of process-focused staff is empowered to collaborate and establish governance rules. This should be addressed by having focused organizational attention on business process management (BPM), including:
- Establishing enterprise-wide level of formal oversight over BPM
- Instituting process governance rules that have strong executive sponsorship
- Developing the support organization, tools and processes for ongoing monitoring of the current performance of processes and to enable future optimization
- Ensuring process collaboration across departments and functions in order to understand end-to-end workflows