Process

Our clients engage us to help them win against: Clinical and customer service quality issues; Waste and inefficiency; Departmental silos and lack of accountability; Powerlessness to create real and permanent change; Physician dissatisfaction and a sense of Apathy.

The Hospital Focus 5 methodology addresses these issues through

• A unique, focused, systematic, written plan developed by Hospital leaders with our active participation and guidance.
• Involvement of ALL employees in your organization and customer service improvement such that outcomes improvement becomes part of their everyday job.
• Top-down, cross-organizational teams focused on strategically important issues AND bottom-up departmentally based teams focused on improvements in their work areas.
• Utilization of trained Process Facilitators to make sure the process itself succeeds.
• Facts and Measures to establish baselines and evaluate success.
• A proven, experience-based approach to defining and then managing the hospital culture towards ownership, accountability and pride.

Together we will move your entire organization from Discovery to Design to Deployment of a unique approach to instill your new way of doing business.

We’ll start with a detailed assessment of where you are today and then, in conjunction with your executive leadership, build a comprehensive plan for tomorrow.

We can assure you that the work required for you to create this plan is both difficult and rewarding. To make the most of your opportunities, you must set goals that challenge you as individuals and as an organization. You must be inclusive and involve a number of people throughout the hospital community. The starting point is to assess and discover where you are today.

This approach includes many work sessions that are roll-up-the-sleeves meetings to discuss, modify and shape the process as it proceeds. Our role is to direct and guide the process, perform analysis together with the hospital leadership and incorporate our experience from other situations.

This interactive and iterative planning process will require more participation, thought and work by senior executives, physicians and front-line employees than may have been expended in past planning efforts. However, the benefits are significant. This more intense process not only provides greater confidence in the final outcome, but it shortens the time necessary to actually develop planned changes. This methodology is also flexible. The final product is therefore guided and shaped by the interactive process with answers not pre-determined at the outset.

DEPLOYMENT

The work only begins with the plan however. Making it real, operational and deployed across the organization requires focus, strong leadership and internal and external consultants as catalysts for change.

The Hospital Focus 5 methodology is based upon three key factors that lead to long lasting success in organizational change and improvement. These factors are:

1. Plan, deploy and manage simultaneously from the Top Down and the Bottom Up.
2. Utilize trained Process Facilitators.
3. Involve all staff on all shifts.

The following are more detailed descriptions of these factors:

#1 Top Down and Bottom Up.

Most organizations take either a top down, management driven approach or a bottom up employee driven approach to improvement. Success is much more likely when all of your organization’s brains are focused on your customers 24/7/365. Management guides the process not only by leading the way and modeling new behaviors, but by establishing cross-organizational, strategically focused Action Groups At the same time, employees, through departmentally based Work Groups, develop projects to improve their area’s customer service (including internal customers), as well as quality and productivity.

Both Action Groups and Work Groups must receive not only “moral support” but real, concrete support from management and from Process Facilitators.

#2 The Use of Process Facilitators.

Most people are familiar with the term facilitator and with people who facilitate meetings. In the Focus 5 methodology, what we term “Process Facilitators” take on a much greater and wider role. This expanded role encompasses the coaching of managers and front line employees, helping both levels of staff develop and refine leadership skills. Process Facilitators, using just-in-time training methods, teach change and improvement principles, problem solving techniques, project management and the use of specific tools (flow mapping, establishing measures, Lean techniques, etc.); most of all, Process Facilitators guide the overall process within and between departments. They see to it that the change process itself stays on track and on target as groups grow and develop.

Because your Process Facilitators, who are full-time employees of the hospital, work closely with experienced managers, up-and-coming informal leaders and staff employees, we teach them the coaching skills they need to help people through the basics of planning, like developing agendas, obtaining the right data and using it in the right way and making presentations. In addition, they provide an invaluable neutral viewpoint (they are not anyone’s boss) in post-meeting and post-project reviews that focus on topics like: Did we accomplish what we needed to? Is the group working together or holding back? Are we measuring what’s being done and not done? What must be accomplished between meetings to assure continued progress? Do we need anything from other departments or senior management? How are we performing against our own implementation plan?

Ongoing progress requires change at an ever-increasing speed and change always has the potential to produce conflict. Managers may even have to work with people they have ignored for years. Process Facilitators can help managers and staff employees anticipate and deal with conflicts as they arise. By facing difficulties with support, they learn to grow, change and improve. For managers and staff alike it’s easier to face real and imagined conflicts with an experienced coach by their side for the long haul.

The Process Facilitator’s ultimate role is to facilitate the entire improvement and change process itself. By being the liaison between senior management, physicians, middle management and front line employees, the facilitator improves communication up, down and laterally within the organization. By providing feedback and information on the process itself to all affected parties, the facilitator navigates toward the organization’s larger, mission orientated goals.

#3 All Employees are Involved.

It is not enough to establish some teams to occasionally work on improvement. All employees on all shifts and in all departments must meet regularly to develop improvement ideas, to prioritize those ideas, to research potential solutions and to measure improvement over time. This requires a united effort: employees, physicians and management working toward meaningful common goals.

The Focus 5 approach transforms the existing “monthly department meeting” structure into functionally-oriented Work Groups – or creates them in areas where the most recent monthly meeting may be beyond memory! We train the Work Group leaders in how to form and get the most out of their groups, and how to best use their assigned Process Facilitator. After a “ramp up” of the first three to four meetings to learn group dynamics and interaction skills, we guide each Work Group into the identification of its major customer groups, and development of appropriate performance indicators and benchmarks related to quality outcomes. By first training and then expecting each and every employee to actively contribute – and by working with senior leadership to provide reinforcement for newly learned positive behaviors – the process becomes one in which each Work Group becomes a rich source for both detailed improvements to work steps, to larger overall enhancements to major customer processes.

Furthermore, we train each Work Group leader and Process Facilitator in the science of documenting and tracking the ideas generated by the groups, in order to quantify benefits to the organization as a whole.