Have you done a health check lately?

Thursday, February 22, 2018 | Lori Walsh

Each year you look back at the performance of your CV programs and analyze year-end financials, maybe even the year-over-year volumes and physician productivity. But is that enough? Should you not truly assess the health of the program overall, just like a yearly exam with your physician?

Measuring quality is not new to physicians, but managing quality now requires more time and effort than ever before.

Whether you consider your program to be an advanced performer, stable, or in need of help, you should be questioning how to improve your organization. With the rapid pace of change in healthcare, staying stagnant can be the death knell for a program. So, where do you start? I would suggest using a very effective tool created by MedAxiom, our Heart Program Self-Assessment. This will help you assess the current state of your program from organizational, operational, clinical and transformational standpoints. Let’s look at each of these areas a little closer.

1. Organizational
   
   

   • When assessing your program from an organizational perspective, focus should be placed on the culture of the program. Culture is a set of values and behaviors that must be developed within, however there are basic fundamental attributes that help shape the culture bases. These attributes include strategic plan, governance structure as well as performance management. Do you have a strategic plan and if so, is it being followed, or does it sit on a shelf collecting dust? What does your governance structure look like? Do you have a clearly defined decision-making process within the physician team as well as the leadership team? Does your leadership have the ability to execute the strategic plan or are their hands tied because no one can make decisions or too many people are required to make a decision? How about performance management, what does your monthly dashboard entail? Collecting data points will only get you so far, actually using your data to make operational and strategic decisions is the key to success.

2. Operational
   
   

   • This is the meat and potatoes of a program assessment. Have you created comprehensive, structured and systematic processes for the tasks your staff performs, and are you making certain the tasks essential to your operations are done accurately and consistently? Standardizing processes, like registration and scheduling, patient clinical encounters and revenue cycle management, can greatly increase your thru-put as well as staff and patient satisfaction. What about your clinical team, do you have everyone working to the top of their license? Are you reviewing the competency of your care teams on a yearly basis and understanding when additional training is needed. Are you maximizing technology to drive efficiency and decision making within your program?

3. Clinical
   
   

   • Most programs today would say their number-one priority is to provide excellent clinic care, but what does excellence look like? To start, all employees in the organization must understand the same quality terms, speak the same quality language and share the same quality vision. Measuring quality is not new to physicians, but managing quality now requires more time and effort than ever before. What about clinical integration? Are you working to coordinate patient care across conditions, providers and settings in order to achieve a higher level of care? Can you measure the outcomes of that effort? Implementing best practices via clinical pathways and disease management programs requires constant measuring and tweaking. You often hear the phrase “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”; a constant feedback loop is key to assessing the clinical component of your program.

4. Transformational
   
   

   • What defines transformational in this day and age of healthcare? It seems like we are constantly trying to “transform” our programs, sometimes voluntarily but often times by market demands. Programs today are facing unprecedented external forces like QPP,  BPCI-A,  ACO, and CPC+, just to name a few. As you assess your program’s ability to be transformational, here are a few questions you might ask: Do you have the bandwidth to embark on a value-based contract? Are you utilizing population-based data to analyze your program and make strategic decisions from that data? To stay competitive in your market, should you be offering virtual visits or telemedicine, and can you support the staffing and technological requirements? These are just a few of the many questions to ask as you look back on the previous year and plan for the next 12-18 months.

This may seem time consuming, but a full assessment of your program can be invaluable to the organization. We know that you cannot fix every aspect of your program overnight, nor should you. I would recommend that you pick 3-5 areas of top concern and focus on those in the coming year. Be sure you can measure your current state and have a clear understanding of what your future state should look like and how it can be measured. Continuous process improvement is a key attribute of top performing organizations; achieving increased efficiency and effectiveness will guarantee your success year after year.

Remember that MedAxiom is here to help you! We have experts who can work with you to determine your top priorities and give you tools to optimize your opportunities. Once you complete the Heart Program Self-Assessment, contact us to go over the results.

 

Lori Walsh, MHA
Vice President, Membership and Senior Consultant, MedAxiom

With an obvious passion for what she does, Lori has worked in healthcare for nearly 20 years, including nine years as the Director of Operations for Heart Clinic Arkansas. In her role as Vice President of Membership, Lori uses her healthcare background to help our current and prospective members build relationships within the industry and maximize the benefits of MedAxiom’s exclusive educational and research support services to improve their programs. As a senior consultant, Lori takes her vast operations experience and applies it towards our client practices in the areas of operational efficiency, financial performance, workflow redesign, strategic planning and business development.

Contact Lori at lwalsh@medaxiom.com.

 

Illustration: Lee Sauer

 

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MedAxiom Consulting is the nation’s leading cardiovascular-specific consulting group, working with a range of private practices, hospitals and health systems across the country to improve the delivery of CV health care. To learn more about our team, please visit our website.                     

 

 

 

 

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