5 Operational Change Tools that Help Staff Get Home from Work on Time

Happy Staff = Happy Customers. Becoming the employer of choice by enhancing staff satisfaction was one of several goals for Monroe Clinic, a modern healthcare facility known for quality care is critical to the health and well-being of their patients, their families and the community. The other project drivers for their new Ambulatory Center are to:

  • Create a flexible, adaptable environment and culture to support evolving care delivery models
  • Honor patient independence and choices by leveraging technology
  • Extend the brand identity and reflect the Mission:
  • Create a spiritual, healing, and sustainable environment
  • Create operational efficiencies leading to valued care
  • Design an environment to practice team-based care, collaborative care and population health

Dave Sheedy, P.E., Principal, Kahler Slater and Cindy Werkheiser, Vice President of Service Excellence & Process Improvement, Monroe Clinic shared these drivers and the story of how these Teams are Owning Operational Change, Eliminating Waste and Working Like Clockwork Delivering Ambulatory Care in their recent Lean Construction Institute Congress presentation. Here’s what the conference audience learned:

Five of the tools that were employed at the project onset to achieve the goals were:

  1. Benchmarking (Seeing how successful businesses do it)
  2. Voice of the customer survey (Understand the needs and wants of the staff and customers)
  3. Current State Virtual Waste Walks (What if you went through your entire day of tasks and identified all the “wastes”. It would probably look like all the things in red below! That is what this team did.)
  1. Adjacency Matrix
  2. Future State Value Stream Mapping (By mapping out every step in a customer’s CURRENT journey, we can then map all the ways we will make their FUTURE day better with a Value Stream map.) Think of it like this….a “current state” might look like you going to Starbucks, you waiting in line, you ordering a coffee, you waiting for it off to the side of the counter. Thus, a future state value stream map might be: you order your coffee from the mobile app on your phone, you go to Starbucks, you pick it up from the counter. No waiting!

By facilitating workflow design with the project stakeholders, the team achieved the following results:

  • 16% of existing waste eliminated through building design
  • 61% of existing waste is eliminated through workflow design
  • 12% of waste has been identified and is yet to be addressed
  • (11% is out of scope)
  • Feedback from providers, staff, and patients has been very positive
  • Provider no longer working into the evening hours catching up on the work of the day

This was certainly the Lean/short version (how appropriate.) If you would like to learn more details about this project, then drop Dave a note here! What are some ways you could eliminate some of the waste in your day to be more efficient and profitable? Share your thoughts with us @KahlerSlater