Work With Us
We help healthcare organizations
transform their processes.
Well-defined and transparent business processes are critical to your organization’s success. Not only do good processes help your business run smoothly, they also lay a solid foundation for tackling strategic goals and priorities .
Below are the most common goals our clients have had when engaging us in process-related work.
Implement a new product or program
Understanding how the product or program will operate from end to end is critical to having a successful launch. A well-documented process is the blueprint for what you are building and will keep the project team aligned and working toward a common goal during implementation.
Develop a new software application
Providing context to development teams for how the software will be used to support the overarching business process will help avoid missed requirements and aid user-centered design.
Scale or onboard new business
Spending some time streamlining your processes can improve confidence that your business can support additional scale or new customers.
Improve cross-functional alignment or transparency
A common problem for organizations of all sizes is feeling like your functional teams are operating in “silos”. Documenting complex processes and socializing them across the organization can bring much-needed transparency and alignment to cross-functional teams.
Control or measure your processes
Setting organizational metric targets is a great start, but if you don’t know how to influence those metrics, you may have problems achieving your goals. Documenting a process and clearly articulating how it will be measured can serve as a foundation to achieving broader organizational targets.
Improve general process efficiency
Most commonly when people think about process improvement, this is what they have in mind - removing waste and inefficiencies in current-state processes to increase throughput and save on administrative costs. This is important for operating lean businesses, improving employee satisfaction and productivity and setting a strong foundation for growth or other strategic initiatives.
How We Work
Our approach will be tailored based on each organization’s unique goals and circumstances. It is our top priority to ensure we are aligned with our client’s goals prior to beginning an engagement. Our typical engagement will include most of the steps outlined below.
Discover
Unless you are creating a new product or program from scratch, there is likely an existing process that needs to be understood. Perhaps this process is working fine but just needs to be more transparent or, more commonly, the existing process may need some improvement. Either way, there is a portion of time dedicated to understanding “how things work” today.
Diagnose
As we work with your team to discover current processes, we will also be noting down parts of the process that may not be working so well. We will spend some time synthesizing the information we’ve collected to distill the issues down to a set of root causes. This inventory of current issues or opportunities will be used as the basis for the following steps.
Solution
This phase may involve designing a “future-state” process or identifying incremental improvements needed to achieve your goals. If the prior two steps were focused on “what problems are we facing”, this step is focused on “what are we going to do about it”. Ideally, the outcome of this step is a prioritized list of initiatives or action items.
Roadmap
In some cases, your solution may be complex and need to fit in a broader scope of work. We can help you create a roadmap articulating the sequencing and relative timing for each solution or action item.
Implement
All of this work is for nothing, without implementation. The last thing we want to do is leave you with a set of recommendations that sit on a shelf collecting dust and potentially losing relevance. Implementing the identified process changes is the most important step and we are here to help you - whether it’s supporting you with planning activities or helping to lead the charge.
Got A Process Issue In Mind?
If you have a complex process that you need to better understand or optimize, let’s talk it over and find out if our services are a good fit.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is a typical project?
The length of the engagement or project will depend on your overarching goals for processtransformation, the complexity of the process(es) and the availability of your team to participate.
Most projects will be 6 to 12 weeks, potentially longer if we are also helping to implement process changes. We can provide a better estimate after a brief conversation to learn more about your business and processes.
Can you use processes we have already documented as the baseline?
We will absolutely leverage existing documentation to get a head start on understanding the current state processes. In some cases we may just need to add some information to existing flows to better capture accountabilities, handoffs, data/system impacts or pain points and opportunities. In other cases, we may be able to use your existing process documentation to get acclimated but ultimately want to document the processes from scratch.
How will you staff your team for our project?
Our principal consultant, Selena Walsh, will lead your project and be your primary point of contact. Depending on the complexity and scope of your project, we may bring in additional consultants to assist with process analysis or business analysis activities. If you have team members you would like directly involved in the work, that’s great! We can craft the project team in a way that meets your needs and sets us up to successfully reach your project goals.
