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Newton-Wellesley saved more than $5 million using ActionOI
We are located right outside the city of Boston, in fact Newton
touches the city limits. 270 beds,
medical, surgical, specialty offerings.
We have a very busy emergency department. We have
65,000 visits a year. We have a Cancer Center.
We're opening up a new cardiovascular Center, so we are a full-service
teaching community hospital. We're actually part of
the Partners Health Care System, which includes
Mass General Hospital and Brigham Women's Hospital.
The challenge our organization was facing is the same, I think, the
same situation everybody else is facing and that is
for the most part lower reimbursements,
increased volume, and actually when you think about health care reform, just to put it in
a nutshell.
You could say that we were asked to do more
with less in respect to reimbursement and then over time especially over the
course of the next couple of years
for more people. We have another added
sort of issue that we pay a lot of attention to, and that
fact is that we are one hospital among ten
in a ten square mile radius, so in and among all those challenges we also have
competition.
We use the
Truven Health Action OI product. Historically we've used it
primarily for position control but since about 2007-2008, we
developed a case study process program
and it's our thoughtful approach to cost savings.
We do very deep dives using the Action OI product
to determine ways to create thoughtful ways to save money
and create efficiencies. A guy by the name of James Huskitt out of
Harvard, who in the early nineties came up with this theory and proved it
and he called it the Internal Service Profit chain. What that
suggests is that by focusing on
internal service support to the folks who have to provide some care
to our patients through a series of relational links
when you have good support services-- relational links like
improved employee satisfaction, more time for nurses and clinicians to spend
on the patients, ultimately improving patient satisfaction,
ultimately hopefully resulting in
some growth in profit. Because
as I mentioned earlier, our hospital is one of 10 in a 10 square mile
radius so we have many tools that measure the spectrum of the Service
Profit chain.
We have Truven Health's Action OI product which
manages and helps us manage our cost and efficiency
but we didn't have anything at the beginning but we do now. We created this
software application called The Support Card. The Support Card
allows our clinicians to grade
the services they receive
to do their job on a weekly basis.
So, housekeeping, IT,
food, nutrition, you name it. There's
ten different labs, radiology, they grade them. What they need to get the job done
we grade and so
a couple of different things happen. They get a score
to which managers are held accountable to and they get comments.
Support Card scores
were not so good. The next quarter they went up
and they increased their overtime exponentially
because they listening to the support service
scores and we saw a dramatic increase
in the service scores and we saw actually
in management, which is the best quantitative thing to say, is
we kept the operation with respect to efficiency and cost
contained at benchmark or even a little bit below.
The reason we do all of this actually in the end, is for
patient satisfaction. Our patients told us that something was working because
our
patient satisfaction scores increased by 15 percent.
in their mean score throughout the inpatient
force. Using the Truven Health Action OI product we've been able to save as I
mentioned
five million dollars from 2008 to 2012
so we do these deep dives into departments and we
as a direction use their Action OI
scores and lines directionally
to look for opportunities: Labor, non- labor.
We've don 15 departments in the hospital from 2008
to now.
What we're focusing on is a balanced approach to operations
and it occurred to us that we had the tools right in front of us
that we were measuring separately. We were measuring different part of Operation
separately in silos almost
so we connected literally from services to clinicians
all the way through cost and efficiency to patient satisfaction
and then with financial indicators, growth.
if you're in a competitive market like we are,
I think you have to pay attention to all of it at the same time
and we think we figured out a way to do it.
so would I recommend Truven Healthcare Analytics?
Absolutely. It's done wonders for us I guess it's actually part of our
culture.
For more information contact truvenhealth.com