EON Blog

In the third part of the four part series from Roger Price's presentation on ROI from continuous improvement, he discusses the importance of managing your investment for continuous improvement in your organization. 

If you missed part two in this series, validating the business case, give that one a watch before you move on to this one. It's important to understanding for all of the steps in order to ensure ROI from your organization's continuous improvement efforts. 

While managing inventory of patients is a key requirement of healthcare facilities, managing distributed equipment inventory doesn’t fall far behind. Having the wrong equipment, too little equipment, contaminated equipment, or equipment in the wrong spot can mean problems for patients. On the other hand, holding more equipment than you actually need is very costly.

Fortunately, managing equipment inventory and distribution is not a new problem. Many industries have addressed and optimized inventory systems and developed methods to pursue continuous improvements. Let’s consider some of the distributed equipment needs in medical facilities and discuss best practices that might apply.

Welcome to part two of the four part series from Roger Price's presentation on the ROI of continuous improvement. In this video, he focuses on the importance of validating the business case for continuous improvement in your organization. 

If you missed the first video in this series, making the business case, go watch that one first. Gaining an understanding for all four steps in this process is crucial when ensuring ROI from your CI efforts. 

Patient safety and quality are the most critically important elements of patient care. Safety and quality cannot just be given lip service, but must be measured and monitored to ensure that they improving or at least not declining. Many health institutions have regular monitoring of KPIs (key performance indicators) for patient safety and performance quality.

In fact, Medicare and Medicaid require that certain measures, such as specific mortality and readmission rates, are reported regularly and often made public. This is a bit like restaurant public health inspection ratings that can draw people in if they’re high or make them shy away—as from the plague—if they’re low.

EON's CEO, Roger Price, gave a presentation on the ROI of Continuous Improvement. The presentation covers the four aspects of ensuring your return on investment from your continuous improvement approach: making the business case, validating the business case, managing your investment, and claiming the value. 

To best provide you with each step of this process, we broke it down for you.

This first video covers the first quarter of his speech and discusses the importance of showing clear ROI across all CI efforts, as well as how to structure CI across multiple plants. 

Without referring providers, many healthcare facilities would find themselves with numerous empty beds and idle medical experts, rapidly on the way to financial decline. Fortunately, referring providers do exist, and the cooperation between primary care providers and hospital facilities can provide the best possible healthcare for patients with serious or chronic medical conditions.

A common challenge for many organizations is to develop an operational excellence deployment model that is sufficiently compelling to overcome the natural inertia (or outright resistance) that resides at the plant sites.  Many of us are familiar with the standard justifications for that inertia, including:

Do you remember the scene in Cool Hand Luke, where a “failure to communicate” brings pain and suffering to Paul Newman? It’s similar in a hospital, where miscommunications can have significant clinical repercussions. Beyond that, poor healthcare communication can result in poor non-clinical outcomes leading to low patient or staff satisfaction and higher costs.

In a previous blog post titled Production Systems 101, I described three key characteristics that could effectively serve as a “litmus test” as to whether your organization has truly implemented a production system vs. having one in name only.