"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."

Working in complex work environments such as healthcare requires leaders to focus on multiple priorities at once.  Sometimes those priorities change on a daily (or even hourly) basis.  Many leaders find themselves “putting out fires” or reacting to those changing priorities, which can result in losing focus on the primary goals or losing focus on a large project to reach those goals that may take weeks or months to accomplish.

As a former administrative director at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and now as a KaiNexus Consultant, I have found that using continuous improvement software during my actual meetings helps me to keep track of progress, and make meetings more productive, while keeping a focus on that goal or large project despite the pressing day to day issues.

The Results Are In!

I’m excited to announce that we just completed another KaiNexus WorkOut with some amazing results at Mary Greeley Medical Center, a 220-bed community hospital in Ames, Iowa.

During the three months we’ve been working together, their team completed 54 Opportunities for Improvements and had a significant impact in a number of key metrics:

• The total financial impact to the organization was $840,898

• $675,475 in “hard” cost savings that affect the bottom line and budgets

• $49,080 in one time revenue generation

• 5209 hours in time savings, resulting in a “soft" savings of  $116,343

Impressively, Mary Greeley achieved these great results while completing and moving into a new patient wing!

Solving Problems with Mary Greeley Medical Center

Nothing makes going to work so pleasant as when you’re working with warm, welcoming, dynamic leaders and engaged and enthusiastic staff.  Luckily, that’s what I found when I showed up at Mary Greeley Medical Center for the first day of our KaiNexus Workout.  As an added bonus, the first day of the workout followed a presentation by Quint Studer of Studer Group, whose teachings I’ve followed for the past five years. Studer successfully roused the group and prepared them for the work that the team and I were about to engage in.

The MGMC team and I  started out by talking about the increased need for healthcare organizations to revamp their current processes in order to eliminate waste so as to meet the changing demands of consumers and government regulations.  MGMC is no exception to that need, so the goal for the KaiNexus Workout was to come up with one Opportunity for Improvement (OI) per person that increased revenue or decreased expenses, of course without negatively impacting quality and safety, and could be completed in 100 days.