Using Lean Six Sigma to Improve Hospital based, Outpatient Imaging Satisfaction - Article Example

Download file to see previous pages Therefore, the paper focuses on improving the service of the imaging department and brings into consideration the expectations of patients regarding the hospital. Unlike any commercial business, where greeting the customer and asking him to pay another visit soon, shall be considered good, such is not the case of the healthcare industry. In order to create an experience in the mind of the patients, service has to be personalized and focused. Previously, the hospital had wrongly focused on the process, procedure, safety and time to deliver the service; however, recent analysis suggested that customer satisfaction is about the consistency in the smooth conduct of the process as well as behavior of the staff. In order to ensure that Methodist achieves its objectives, it has decided to adopt a process that involves six sigma approaches and includes steps that are Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control.
Moreover, the customer satisfaction is the function of the service that is delivered to outpatients; therefore, the department has decided to pay special attention to these patients. Furthermore, the hospital uses Press Ganey service to assess its patient’s satisfaction....
The volume modality table seems to confirm the strategy of the hospital as outpatients seems to be the most frequent user of the machinery as compared to others while their share is approximately 50% in the case of Ultrasound, MRI and nuclear medicine. Thus in order to measure the performance in achieving those objectives, a more focused approach was laid down by reviewing the past data of outpatient imaging. The data revealed that the customer’s satisfaction has a very strong correlation with the time that the patient has to wait after being called down to testing area. Thus, based on this finding, a research was conducted that also confirmed the earlier finding. Therefore, the process was redesigned in order to improve efficiency in the system such that the lagging time shall be minimized. This was initiated by forming the workflow of all the four areas involved in the process which includes scheduling, registration, imaging and specific modality. However, more important in this regard was the communication regarding the appointments that were made with the patients since the time can be interpreted in more than one ways, while there used to a background noise that made communication difficult. In this regards, the email system was proposed as the solution to the problem. The most important part is the process of registration which used to take a lot of time due to its complex nature, such was simplified. Further, the outpatient was not being focused upon, as inpatient was being prioritized more over to outpatient regardless of the condition of the patients. To ensure further patient satisfaction, he will be communicated and briefed about the time the tests will start and details related to it. In case, he is late then he can be ...Download file to see next pagesRead More