Activating New Initiatives Quickly.

With the COVID-19 crisis pressuring health care delivery from every angle, Freed Associates has seen an uptick in clients engaging us to support fast-turnaround needs. One client engaged us to partner with them to roll out mass-vaccination sites, while another engaged us to develop an agile-based Rapid Response Playbook to support any number of their fast-paced projects. Other clients have also turned to our team to expand digital capabilities, extend remote-work resources, and many other time-critical COVID-19-related challenges. We have experience, playbooks and checklists for executing on these initiatives both large and small.

COVID-19 mass vaccination site openings

Right now, health systems are tasked with administering vaccines as quickly as possible at unprecedented scale. Freed was recently engaged by a regional health system to help tackle the administrative and logistical challenges of enabling mass-vaccination centers.  The health system and Freed partnered to customize a mass-vaccination-site opening checklist which enabled the health system to rapidly set up several sites in less than one month.

Freed and the health system prepared the mass-vaccination sites for opening by addressing a wide range of requirements, which included:

• Site selection, contracting, facility planning and design
• Security management to ensure both physical and technical security
• Operations including appropriate staffing and onsite supplies checklist
• Supply chain planning
• Communications and marketing
• Command center logistics

Playbook built on agile principles

The ability to quickly address unexpected and urgent challenges has become a top priority for many healthcare organizations.  Freed recently helped a client develop a Rapid Response Playbook built on the principles of agile methodology. Some elements of the playbook change based on demands of the project, but regardless of the specific tasks, Freed’s playbook for rapid response addresses the following elements, and more:

Intake process. Clear stakeholder engagement, correctly capturing the correct data upfront, and prioritizing work efficiently according to business value.

Execution efficiency. Status tracking that avoids overburdening those doing the work, real-time access to the overall situation for leaders governing the work, short sprint cycles that deliver minimum viable product (MVP) within days, and incremental improvement.

Cross-functional collaboration. An engagement model that efficiently collaborates with stakeholders, and manages work using an action board for visibility.

Data-driven decisions. Leveraging big data management to better prioritize, execute, manage and ultimately realize the opportunities for business value.

Through a combination of decades of experience, proven operational playbooks and rapid-mobilization capabilities, Freed is ready to accelerate time-to-value. Reach out — we’d love to hear from you.