Healthcare Process Measurement - Essay Example

Most of you must have attended the Healthcare forum on leadership presented by Greg Banacznski, my close workmate at Aurora. What am about to get you through is my experience and the lessons I learned as a chief of staff and the Vice President of the office of project management. In the former, my role was championing and holding staff accountable to the process rigor, while in the latter, I developed tools, processes, methodologies, and discipline of the required efforts. I was an alumnus of UWM, having attained a Bachelor’s degree in secondary education. I worked as an internal consultant in the MGIC Department of Systems and Procedures, as well as at Johnson’s controls. I proceeded on Payco America under external consulting roles for 12 years, training, customer service roles, and receivable operations in healthcare, as the first female Vice President of ops. I then decided to go to Marquette’s Law School. In Aurora, I assumed several roles: receivables, billing, business office, compliance after MUL graduation, VP operations, and worked finally as a chief of staff. My current role is working with PMs, tools, and methodologies of PMs, as the Chief Integration Officer for the outsourcing and technology division, which supports the management cycle of revenue in the sector of healthcare (Shapiro et al, 2006).

The process’ purpose was to create discipline around the execution and selection of the organization’s tactics that achieve target plans for patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, quality, financial performance, and growth (Shapiro et al, 2006). The process was disciplined, structured, replicable, and facilitated. From the lessons we learned, playbooks are completed by leader-led teams with program accountability. They take 75-90 days to be developed: including planning, vetting/ approval, funding, and building individual actions, and culminate in a semi-annual event. This effort takes leaders, and if done well, it is part of an “event”, and commissions a commitment.

Playbook creation involved:  the overarching charter which described the team’s game plan, the timeline that demonstrated the launch and duration of each initiative, outcome measurement over time, and the resources needed in the effort of budget planning. The strategic implementation playbook is template-based. It focuses on the discussion scope, imposes orchestrated continuity and content structure, and enables the build-up of operating units of work or plans of others. Moreover, it illuminates overlaps or connectedness and creates a common language and platform (Shapiro et al, 2006). The playbook worked to achieve the strategic targets for Aurora since it was financially credible, strategically tenable, and operationally achievable. It identified measurements, contingency triggers, the required model for success as well as metrics and milestones. Moreover, it drove risk identification, metric target development, critical assessments of playing fields, the making of reasoned assumptions, and the development of well-planned plays.

 The playbook proposal contained a plan presentation by 5 domain teams showing the current state of the backdrop, best practices, and environmental assessment, overarching plan, individual 1-pagers containing details on the tactics that drive the results, a pictorial movement of the results, identification of barriers and risks as well as resourcing of the alternatives. The playbook worked for Aurora in quality assessment of the environment, for instance, while the key driver showed the shifting of healthcare expenses, and costs to employees, the future reality is that there will be price transparency, consumer quality, and patient satisfaction and the implication is that outcome measures are deemed to drive steerage of payer patients. The long-term quality benchmarks encompassed the percentage of patients that received “perfect care” as defined by national standards implicating that patients will eventually go beyond the hospital (Shapiro et al, 2006).

Secondly, there was a need to create “playbook legs” by working over 75-90 days in developing local responsive actions, which will aid in achieving the targets and strategic objectives of the corporation. Thirdly, upon approval and funding, there was much focus and accountability for the work outcome throughout the year. The outstanding topics were playbook creation, quarterly operating review, ongoing focus, and accountability. The reality is that clinicians and administrators relied on PMOs and PMs in creating playbooks. The tools, timing, and methodologies sprung from expert teachers and leaders, who held colleagues accountable for the process and outcomes. There are many lessons that we learned: Aurora developed new leaders; which included teams, plans, and targets, these leaders engaged with colleagues in meaningful work, and playbooks were completed by leader-led teams with program accountability.