The Challenge Ahead: Putting an End to Wasteful Healthcare Spending

As healthcare reform discussions progress, so does the visibility into the amount of money that is being wasted in healthcare each year. A recent report on the U.S. Healthcare System suggests that $505 to $850 billion is wasted annually on preventable mishaps and inefficiencies.  The chart below highlights common money pitfalls in the healthcare industry.

Many of the pitfall areas noted above involve process rework and redundant activities that can easily be avoided with the implementation of a quality process automation system.  With process automation or Business Process Management (BPM) software, healthcare providers have the ability to model, automate, manage, and optimize key processes to eliminate inefficiencies and increase visibility.

As you can see from the chart, 37% of wasteful spending is on unnecessary testing and overuse of antibiotics. This refers to tests that are performed multiple times to avoid malpractice, negligence of testing, and error prone reporting. Using BPM to automate testing and reporting procedures, healthcare providers are able to eliminate the need for unnecessary, repeated testing, and overuse of antibiotics. With standardized forms that capture data electronically and can auto-populate other pertinent medical forms and records, negligence is greatly reduced. From the point that the data is captured throughout the rest of the process (and ultimately patient's history) the results are documented as well as the treatments and dosages prescribed.

Taking electronic forms and reporting to another level, CIO Magazine reported one hospital that has already implemented BPM has seen a significant improvement in reducing the workloads of nurses. Automating such processes as patient evaluation, medical record documentation and clinician notification has allowed nurses to eliminate the need to "manually send 354,000 text pages to the in-house beeper system and 160,000 text-to-speech telephone calls" (Chester County Hospital) allowing them to spend more time on the quality of care they provide to patients.

With growing demands of high quality, operational excellence, and reduced healthcare costs, what is your hospital doing to improve efficiency?  Have you considered BPM Software as a solution?

 

Relevant Links:

Hospitals: Attempting to Save $155 Billion

Lean Healthcare?

Getting Back to What's Important

Healthcare Providers Cannot Afford To "Directly" Use BPM Systems, but...

 

Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus

Patient Care & Safety: The Importance of Standard Procedures

In the realm of healthcare having well defined, clear, controlled, and consistent processes can mean the difference between success and failure. I was at the Hospital Accreditation Update Event yesterday, hosted by the Joint Commission, and the speaker was emphasizing the importance of having two unique identifiers per patient and the standard procedures for operation. He gave an example of two patients who were nearly identical.  They had the same name, birthday, age, and ethnicity. Moreover, the patients were seeing the same doctor for the same problem. As the patients were older, both qualified for Medicare- and even the Medicare Account numbers were only different by one digit.  The one major difference between the two patients is that one was at high risk for complete vision loss with the specific surgery and the other was not.  To make a long story short, the wrong patient was operated on and left completely blind.

Because the particular hospital did not have the correct check marks in place to ensure that two unique identifiers were being used consistently throughout a defined, well structured operation approval process, the end result was a costly failure. Had the said hospital implemented a process automation solution, various approval check marks would have arisen as alerts and notifications to process participants and medical staff. Moreover, having the patients entered into the process automation system by their unique identifiers would have maintained identifier consistency throughout the process, ultimately ensuring that the right patient (without high risk) received the right treatment and surgery.

This is just one example of where process automation and improvement software can play a key role in patient safety. Other examples include:

• Recording and tracking patient allergens to ensure the proper prescriptions are given
• Alerts and notifications to remind medical staff to dispense patient medication at the correct time
• Patient scheduling and follow up visits to ensure timely treatment and monitor progress
• Patient reassessment alerts to medical staff to ensure the patients are being monitored and reevaluated for the treatment they've received and their overall status

When you are dealing with someone's life and operations that will forever change that patient and his/her family, precision and quality of care are of the utmost importance. Considering how many patients hospitals treat annually and how many people come in with similar problems and backgrounds, is your hospital doing all it can to provide the highest quality of patient care and safety?

 

Relevant links:

Hospitals: Attempting to Save $155 Billion

Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Business Process Improvements

Lean Healthcare?

Getting Back to What's Important

Healthcare Providers Cannot Afford To "Directly" Use BPM Systems, but...

 

Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus

BPM As A Foundation For Business Transformation

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend some time with one of our customers who presented a very interesting story on how they completely transformed their business.  As a strategic move in their market place, they decided to reinvent themselves and the value they could bring to their existing and new customers.  This business transformation included new management, front-line workers, and the back office technologies they use in their day-to-day operations.  As you may guess, intensive strategy and planning must be executed to ensure the business itself does not fail in the midst of this transformation.  Our customer was excited to describe how, with careful planning and Ultimus BPM, their business transformation went smoothly.

Business Transformation is more chaotic than just optimizing the operations and processes in your business today.  Many BPM Suite (BPMS) vendors describe how their suites provide optimization functionalities, but BPM Suite functionality also provides inherent value to business transformations.  While business optimization functionality caters well to situations such as new employee inclusion in processes or the necessity of upgrading business rules on existing processes, business transformation can often lead to massive process changes (if not significant rewrites to current business processes).  Moreover, business transformations can often include retiring / turning off antiquated applications and introducing entirely new applications.

BPM Suites provide inherent value to business transformations by providing an abstraction layer from the day-to-day operations, the underlying applications and user directories.  Well constructed BPM environments and processes can mitigate the disruptions of changed back office applications to the front line workers.  Qualities of a well constructed BPM environment and business process are:

• Process participants are not embedded into the process definitions themselves. Rather, roles cited in the steps in the process have direct definition relations to job functions include in the company's underlying directory store (Active Directory, LDAP, etc)
• Integrations from the BPM environment and business processes are constructed using SOA technologies. By using a SOA architecture, back office systems can be replaced without the need to reconstruct and/or recompile call outs to those systems from the BPM environment.
• BPM environment integrations to other application servers, such as web servers and database servers, can be made using alias names. By using alias names, rather than specific DNS names or IP Addresses, new application servers can easily be introduced into a company's IT landscape with no additional reconfigurations required in the BPM environment.

The graphic below shows how BPM can fit in your company's IT landscape.  See that through a BPM architecture, your existing core BI technology can be replaced with a new BI application without directly impacting the day-to-day operations of your work force.

Is your company's IT infrastructure constructed to support a business transformation?  Are you using BPM for all the advantages it can provide?

 

Relevant Links:

Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes

BPM is a Methodology First

Chris Adams Responds to "BPM VIEWPOINT: The Opportunity in Unstructured Business Process Management"

 

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

Great Success with Lean Hospitals Webcast

Yesterday's webcast "Your Hospitals Lean Initiatives- Why EHR Isn't Enough" broadcasted with great success. The webcast featured Danielle Lavallee, Senior Healthcare Consultant, at Lean Hospitals, LLC and Tom Marsan, e-Health Project Manager, of Children's Medical Center in Dallas. Their presentations consisted of a detail analysis on how and where Lean Principles can be applied in healthcare and hospitals, in particular.

Key Topics of the webcast included:

• How "lean thinking" can fit into your hospital's Best Practices for lean healthcare
• Actual experiences and areas where hospitals have seen the most success with lean initiatives
• Real examples of how BPM software has been used to achieve operational efficiencies in hospitals
• Lessons learned and common pitfalls when implementing lean principles
• Why EHR alone will not achieve maximum efficiency

Some of the highlights of the presentation included Danielle's thorough breakdown of healthcare space and how the changes are affecting things like cost, quality, healthcare professionals, and outpatient centers. More importantly, she noted how this chain reaction, when combined with lean thinking and a well structured workflow system, can be controlled to deliver the desired results.

Tom Marsan bridged the gap between the idea of Lean Thinking and the act of Lean Thinking by sharing how Childrens' Medical Center of Dallas technologically advanced their organization to achieve lean operations by implementing a fully functional, robust BPM Suite.  His hospital saw results in less than 6 months with their FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) Process.

In case you missed it, click here to view a copy of the webcast and to learn more about how your organization can achieve its Lean Six Sigma initiatives with Business Process Management.

 

Relevant Links:

Security in BPM Suites Can Remedy Security Breaches in Paper based Medical Records

More Than Going Lean... Going Green

Lean Healthcare?

Visibility Into Your Processes Helps You Control Your Costs

Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Business Process Improvements

 

Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus

Security in BPM Suites Can Remedy Security Breaches

Recently a co-worker mentioned that a family member's medical records may have been breached and that there is a possibility that some of his records were too. This got me to think more about the security around all of the systems that contain our most personal information. Ultimately, I find this as just another force behind the push for Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

As it stands today many doctors' offices have a room full of shelves that are buried under files and files of medical records. Note that this room of files is frequently left open to be accessed by nurses and physicians assistants prepping patients. Sometimes, at small clinics and private doctor's offices, it is even open for the public to see. And as many of us have multiple doctors and specialist, security breaches exists when paper based medical files are literally mailed and shipped from office to office. This lack of security puts anyone who has ever been seen or treated at that facility at risk. This is where EHRs could play a major role.

Implementing a BPM system to facilitate your EHR project can equip your organization with greater control and visibility than you think. First, BPM can streamline the process of electronically capturing and organizing the data contained in your client's medical records. Secondly, with all of the data and records being electronic, BPM allows you to set up rules and restrictions around the records. This is extremely beneficial to healthcare organizations in several ways:

• While BPM is not software security, it does have the ability to define a workflow, involving only pertinent parties at each step. From this, rules and authorizations can be applied to the process ensuring that only authorized personnel are able to complete necessary tasks.
• As a back end piece to the point above, BPM can be used to automate and ensure security clearance and the authorization approval process for nurses and physicians assistants
• It allows the process champion to name responsible individuals in the process
• Most importantly, based on login access, BPM can be used to track and report on who accessed the patient database, when it was accessed, who's records were opened, and updates or changes that were made.

Thus, combining and integrating EHR software with BPM ensures your organization is proactively protecting the confidential information of its patients at all times.  It also eliminates the need for an entire room full of paper files that potentially anyone could walk into. This being said and given all of the mandated healthcare reforms, how can your organization not afford a secure system for protecting and monitoring patient information?

 

Relevant Links:

Hospitals: Attempting to Save $155 Billion

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Enforces Stricter HIPAA Compliance Regulations

Process Optimization in Government and Healthcare

Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes

 

Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus

More Than Going Lean... Going Green

Today, many organizations are incorporating "Lean Thinking" into their objectives in an effort to improve operational efficiency; making up a large portion of these organizations are healthcare providers and hospitals. New legislation and regulations in the healthcare industry call for reduced wasteful spending and the use of Electronic Health Records to streamline information and facilitate patient treatment. What many organizations are coming to realize is that their efforts to go Lean are also helping them to go Green.

Both, Lean and Green thinking involve a company-wide commitment to change and make more sensible decisions about the way the company operates and how money is spent. Lean Thinking focuses on:

• Achieving the highest operational efficiency possible
• Reducing wastes
• Cutting costs
• Increasing productivity
• Improving cycle time

Green thinking, takes a slightly different approach, emphasizing:

• Paperless, efficient processes
• Making eco-friendly decisions
• Implementing a virtual work environment

Both methodologies, while different in nature, can be facilitated by implementing a Business Process Management Suite (BPMS).  BPM Software advances Lean and Green initiatives by automating paper-based forms and making them available electronically. Additionally, electronic forms capture patient information and updates automatically, eliminating the need for manual data entry, and thereby saving process participants time while reducing human errors that would otherwise have to be corrected. With process modeling, organizations then have the ability to map and automate out their day-to-day business processes to identify and eliminate bottlenecks and pitfalls to improve the organizations overall operational efficiency.

Is your organization exploring "Lean Thinking"? Does your organization want to go Green? If so, have you looked in to BPM?

 

Relevant Links:

Lean Healthcare?

Controlling Process "Rework" with Lean Six Sigma Practices

Visibility Into Your Processes Helps You Control Your Costs

Are You Green?

 

Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus

Response to: "SMBs and the BPM Vendors' Dirty Little Secret"

When I read stories about the difficulty of BPM (Business Process Management) penetration into the SMB (Small and Medium Businesses) space, I often see arguments based on BPM Suite (BPMS) functionality and BPMS pricing. I think both of these points are valid, but not unique to the SMB space. Large scale companies want the same "ease of use" and "flexibility" in a BPMS that SMBs do. And while large scale companies, on a whole, have bigger pockets, BPMS purchases by the large scale companies are not always at the enterprise level. As such, many of same pricing and licensing constraints are encountered by the large company's individual department that is considering the BPMS purchase.

I argue that the single most constraint for SMBs is time. SMBs can be slow to adopt a BPMS because of the fact that everyone in the SMB is "heads down" in executing their day-to-day processes just to maintain their business (even if their processes are not efficient and/or cost controlling as they would like them to be). If the SMB spares even one resource to commit to a BPM initiative, that is one less person involved in operating their mission critical processes today. Over and above SMBs needing a flexible and powerful BPMS, SMBs need help from the BPMS providers themselves to augment their limited available resources. BPMS providers need to provide a full BPM solution to the SMBs which should include:

• Centers of Excellence (staffed by the BPM provider) which consults into the SMB
• Flexible E-Learning programs where SMBs can regularly and routinely learn how to leverage the BPMS
• Process Templates (which provide pre-built and "canned" common process solutions which are "plug and play")
• Virtual, Hosted, and SaaS BPMS solutions which allow the SMBs the avoidance of having to invest time and money into hardware and on-premise software
• Online BPM Communities, where SMBs can share knowledge, processes, best practices, and information

 To read the original article, click here.

 

Relevant Links:

Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Business Process Improvements

Building Your Ultimus V8 Process Library Quickly: Reusable Process Libraries

BPM Implementation: Why Training is so Important

Building Your Company's Center for Process Excellence

 

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus