Successfully Shifting a Health Care Project Team to Operations
By Cathy Savinsky and Alan Stadelhofer. As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. While common for enterprise health care project teams to shift into more operational roles toward the end of their projects, unless the new operational roles and responsibilities are well-defined, team members risk getting lost in the transition and failing to provide their organizations with proper and needed levels of support. In this article, we share our recommendations for best...
Going Digital to Improve the Provider-Patient Experience By Elyse Ruiz
As seen in Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review. Technology has redefined how people shop for and consume goods and services. In today’s digital era, companies like Amazon, Uber, and Apple have revolutionized how transactions are conducted – at the touch of a button, anywhere and anytime. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, e-commerce in the United States grew by 14.6 percent in 2015, marking the sixth consecutive year that online sales grew...
Improve Clinical Interactions to Increase Patient Engagement and Bottom Line Results
It is easy to picture an internist lamenting his patients’ seeming inability to improve their health by making better lifestyle choices: “If I could just get some of my patients to eat less, exercise more and quit smoking, they’d have a much greater quality of life and need to see me far less.”
Conference Reveals New Provider Perspectives in Patient Engagement By Jim Buckheit
As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. We hear the term “patient engagement” often, but is it really making a difference in terms of patient experience and outcomes? According to a recent NEJM Catalyst Insights Council survey of 340 hospital or health care executives, clinicians and clinical leaders, less than a quarter of their patients were highly engaged in their care decisions and just 9 percent of respondents reported high...
Leveraging Technology to Enhance Population Health Efforts By Chet Stagnaro
How can you cost-effectively and efficiently harness technology to improve your population health efforts? When leveraging technology to enhance population health efforts, use technology solutions that keep patients at the center of your analysis and actions. Here are five technology best practices and five people-centric best practices to help guide your technology-driven population health efforts.
Proper IT Governance Begins with These Best Practices By Mark Jahn
As seen in Managed Healthcare Executive. Leadership, according to the late management expert Warren Bennis, is the capacity to translate vision into reality. While that’s clear in industries and organizations of all types, it’s especially so in IT leadership, which fundamentally works to make an organization’s business visions real. IT leadership begins with the fundamental principles of governance, to help direct and guide an organization. But IT governance can be a challenge for many health care organizations, which...
Nine Best Practices in Healthcare IT Project Management By Mark Jahn
As seen in Managed Healthcare Executive. Complexity comes with IT project management in health care, given the inherent need to balance competing stakeholder interests with limited resources and time. It’s also necessary to factor in the increasing rate of technology changes and external factors, such as health care-specific regulations and the risk of increasing data intrusion threats. That’s why, foundationally, health care organizations must have sound IT project management practices in place to sensibly manage both human and...
ACOs: Implementing and Sustaining Value-Based Change By Bob Wadsworth
As seen in Health Intelligence Network. Just as “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” neither is an efficient, sustainable, and physician-focused accountable care organization (ACO). Instead, expect to embrace a stair-step approach to making the necessary changes in your care delivery and administrative practices. Competency and capability development is always multi-dimensional, so consider these five steps as a benchmark for your organization’s critical thinking on ACO development. Introduction In California, we’re now in what could be termed the “second generation”...
Understanding Patient Experience: Best Practices and Lessons from HCAHPS Successes
Patient experience has become a major factor in health care — and for good reason. Not only is patient experience (aka patient satisfaction) now directly tied to reimbursement, but as the health care marketplace becomes more competitive via partnerships, mergers and new entrants, patients — many of whom are paying higher deductibles —are increasingly noting the value and service they receive in their health care delivery. As a result, health care, like other industries, is becoming more consumer-centric. Providers must respond accordingly. Some health care organizations are basing...
Making the Most of Population Health Efforts
There’s a business maxim that says: "what gets rewarded gets repeated." What gets rewarded also gets people's attention, such as last year's historic HHS announcement that by the end of 2018 it would like an ambitious 90% of traditional Medicare payments transformed into value-based reimbursement, through accountable care organizations, bundled payments or hospital quality programs. As recently as 2011, Medicare made almost no payments through alternative payment models. For providers, if population health wasn’t already a strategic mandate,...
Agile Management Can Benefit Health Care Process Improvement Projects By Chet Stagnaro
As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. Health care organization leaders are working hard to create, update and continuously improve on their processes to align with the Triple Aim initiative (see Figure 1. Triple Aim Model). Their top priorities include providing appropriate levels of patient care and patient care quality, as well as learning about patient and health plan member populations and optimizing costs for health care delivery. Since these priorities are so focused on process efficiencies and patient...