Our expertise in the field has enabled us to develop a large inventory of business best practices that can apply to human services across health care – with a special emphasis on community care.
Examples of Best Practices
1. Access
Every health care organization is presented with new or existing clients who need access to a health professional. Many organizations have large waiting lists of people with their health issues changing even as they wait. Client-focused organizations seek to understand the client’s issue fully at the first contact and do ‘today’s work today’. Implementing an ‘access quality measurement system’ that includes measures of demand, delay and backlog is vital to getting change implemented. Organizing client referrals into groups based on the standard work required for each is a change of thinking from triaging based on urgency alone. The bottom line is clients get what they need sooner.
Contact Doleweerd Consulting to learn more.
2. ‘In-Quality’ Staffing
In our experience, most queues for service in health care are due more to variability in staffing than unpredictable demand. Just because staff are working doesn’t mean they are available. Staff meetings, in services, lunch, travel time and other events are all important contributors to whether staff are availability for client care. Establishing control points for when today’s staffing needs to be increased, and decreased, can go a long way to resolving staff concerns about overwork, and management concerns about productivity. Defining ‘quality’ in terms of staffing levels is the first step to maintaining staffing levels so that patient safety, care quality and efficiency is optimized.
Contact Doleweerd Consulting to learn more.
3. Information inventory
Health care organizations are plagued with forms – both electronic and paper- growing organically over time. An information audit and inventory is one way of getting control over information, and reduce over-processing waste. From time to time, doing a deep-dive into your core processes to itemize information collection will help you obliterate over-collection. Not only does this give your staff satisfaction but the found time allows them to spend more time offering what patients really want.
Contact Doleweerd Consulting to learn more.
Other examples of best practices include:
- Measuring takt time of core processes, identifying and eliminating the bottleneck process by reducing cycle time.
- Single order entry (e.g., medical supplies)
- Segmenting Clients based on Value Proposition
- Creating Visual Demand within the workplace
Contact Doleweerd Consulting to learn more.
