HOW OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE CAN IMPACT HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
Are you facing any difficulty in Operational handling of your healthcare facility? Do you know how operational excellence can impact the Healthcare Industry? In this article, Hospaccx Healthcare Consultancy has mapped all the information on the impact of operational excellence in the Healthcare Industry.
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘operational excellence’ (OE) describes a way of working for healthcare organizations and systems. At the heart of this is delivering improvements in care quality and safety by the everyday, ongoing use of continuous improvement techniques that are driven and owned by frontline staff. Operational excellence must be fully and durably supported by the entire organization and board; by specialized and ongoing training; and where necessary, by external facilitators and supporters.
Operational excellence is a culture; a philosophy about how to deliver healthcare. It is a learning journey for an organization in how to improve by becoming sustainably self-analytical and self-critical.
To achieve operational excellence, the heroic, all-knowing problem-solver and answer-provider model of senior executive/clinician must evolve into a coach, facilitator, and supporter of staff throughout the organization, helping them learn how to identify problems, ask questions about root causes and develop, implement and review solutions.
Hospital Operational Excellence deploys a variety of process improvement & change management concepts and approaches to increase operational efficiency and reduce clinical variability; the ultimate objective is to drive the total medical care cost down while improving care quality.
Providers have shaved off substantial costs in the following areas
- Front-end manpower cost optimization
- Materials cost optimization
- Overhead optimization
HEALTHCARE OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE SYSTEM
- Strategy deployment
Setting up strategic priorities and cascading them across the organization, ensuring that all staff knows how they contribute to them. Key elements include: metrics, visual management for performance, standard work for leaders including Executive portfolio reviews.
- Operational Management System
The Operational Management System is a set of behaviours, tools, and techniques that support daily continuous improvement, sustainability, and alignment of improvement. Working in a group to create ‘model cells’ which then act as an internal reference point for rolling out to other departments. This is key to sustainability as it engages staff across the organization in cultural change.
- Operational Improvements
Improvements through value stream analysis and rapid improvement events for key processes to both improve performance, build capability in staff to support continuous improvement.
- Centre of Excellence
Implementing a center of excellence, that includes a structured approach for improvement, a toolkit, and the skilling up of a central team that will support the organization to continue the journey of improvement.
BENEFITS OF IMPLEMENTING OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
- Time spent at OPD can be reduced by 40% approximately.
- Distance covered by patients can be reduced by 20% approximately by streamlining the layout and reorganizing.
- Space utilization can be increased by 60%.
- Reduction in stock-taking time, huge cost savings in inventory carrying costs, etc.
- 95% reduction in the time nurses spend searching for supplies and equipment.
- 77% reduction in door-to-bed time.
- High standards of housekeeping and hygiene can be achieved.
- Advanced operational excellence tools can further assist in reducing patient hospital stay duration, bed occupancy improvement, operations theatre utilization, and others.
PROCESS OF SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTING OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
- Making operational excellence work is all about behaviour
A key element is knitting the organization together in a new way: helping frontline staff develop a new working system, see the bigger picture, and connecting the organization’s strategy to daily improvements in quality and safety.
- Communications are important
Explaining the changes that are coming as the work is rolled out, and to celebrate the successful improvements that follow from this work. Operational excellence work involves getting leaders to change behaviours: this may seem confusing unless it is explained to the rest of the organization. A change of this scale has to come with a communications plan.
- Middle management matters, a lot
There is a big challenge in cascading the strategy of operational excellence throughout organizations so that it is consistent. Plugging in middle management is easier said than done: it requires real alignment and focus at all levels of an organization. The role of middle management is in getting this work from the operational realm to becoming cultural. Middle management needs to be bought into this approach and to understand it.
- Clarity about accountability and goals
Operational excellence requires organizations to have focus and accountability around what they are working towards. It can be loose as to how to achieve this but should be tight on what the organization needs to achieve.
- Technology and IT
These can be an important companion and a differentiator for operational excellence work. Technology should equip and enable operational excellence management work, for example through displaying real-time performance metrics, but it is not an end in and of itself.
- Sustainable transformation
Shifting improvement culture to one of continuous improvement means moving from ‘top-down change’ through command and control to ‘bottom-up change’, enabling and empowering front-line staff.
- Operational improvement (OI)
It is the more traditional use of continuous improvement methodology which redesigns pathways and processes to eliminate waste and variation to standardize care.
- Operational management (OM)
OM creates a new “Board toward” management approach and culture. Staff is trained to work with new tools and routines, and they are coached to adopt new behaviours. This creates a” golden thread” that drives performance improvement, delivers sustainable results, and creates a culture of continuous improvement.
- Operational design (OD)
It is the redesign of enabling processes, such as technology and systems, infrastructure, and people roles and reward systems within an organization. The design is based on the performance led approach.
CONCLUSION
India is a developing nation, even today the healthcare is not affordable for the needy. Hospital Operational Excellence is a panacea to address these challenges. Further looking at accreditations from NABH and NABL, which shall be pre-requisite and not optional; operational excellence and continual improvement shall be part and parcel of the industry. These concepts are not only applicable to the manufacturing industry but also equally applicable for hospital management.
It is a philosophy that can change the way hospitals and healthcare industries are managed and organized. Healthcare professionals are good at administering patient care, blending it further with operational excellence shall enhance life for all stakeholders.
If you need any consultation for Operation Management of your healthcare facility, you can contact us: Hospaccx healthcare business consulting Pvt. Ltd you can visit our website hospaccxconsulting.com
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