Category: General
Business Process Management is an intricate, multi-faceted discipline that requires foresight and strategy. The only way you become better at BPM is through commitment and focus, which happens over time. Just as your employees have to commit to using the technology to guide their daily work, management has to commit to continual improvement, which means sometimes responding when the best-laid plans don't deliver the results you expect.
What if you could cut out the beginning part where your healthcare organization has to closely focus and define (then refine and redefine) to find the perfected flow and instead skip straight to the time at which insights are revealed and lessons are learned? We’ve drawn on decades of experience working with companies looking to improve their business processes to deliver some wizened advice on better BPM.
Companies trying to reinvent everything at once are overextended and not able to handle problems that arise or build improvements into their approach. Instead, start with one important process build out from there – these processes will be related to your core foundation, and interplay will be better. It’s like Scrabble: Instead of trying to get all of your points in a single word from the outset, you lay a basis that allows you to score with some of the trickier combinations.
According to Medforce Technologies CEO Esther Apter, organizations struggle when they take a new process live but fail to fully commit. If you choose to implement BPM software with a notes section, for example, you can’t keep storing your notes separately in an email draft or a Google Doc, because you’re not centralizing data (which was the goal in the first place). “When you commit to a new process, you can’t bypass the system,” Apter says. “If your information is incomplete, there is no way to fully track processes, so you can’t uncover areas for improvement.”
For employees, changing process that are used every day can be scary. If they don’t understand the value of the change or why it is necessary, healthcare organizations may face resistance, which can (and will) hamper the success of the new BPM system. Medforce’s CTO, Nathan Apter, says that there are two main reasons employees may feel vulnerable when changing systems: Either because they’re comfortable and change-averse, or because they’ve been coasting, and know that technology would reveal their lack of productivity.
It’s important to ensure that the software team, the admins on the customer side, and the users are on the same page. The best way to set expectations for alignment, according to a Medicare Part D Operations Manager at a Fortune 20 company (and current Medforce customer), is to document up-front, before questions arise or confusion sets in. “The translation from sales to implementation needs to be detailed so it is not up to interpretation,” the Operations Manager says.
If you’re considering a new BPM system, you must go in with developed ideas about the problems you’re looking to solve and ways in which you need to increase productivity. The Fortune 20 operations manager says that a developed vision of success may be best to implement in tiered stages that’ll serve as guideposts along the way.
Don’t just check in on calendar milestones – get regularly scheduled check-ins on progress on your KPIs, as well as the performance and usage of the BPM system or software itself. We recommend a standing weekly meeting, which will proactively bring challenges to the surface as they arise. Some weeks you’ll end up with nothing to report, but it’s always better to check in regularly than to be overwhelmed with big issues. If you do need to change something, it’s easier to make incremental changes than full revamps after a problem has festered.
The case for revising your BPM processes is more effective when it’s made through data and analytics than when it’s a gut feeling or a judgment call. After choosing a BPM, says Nathan Apter, you should analyze data to understand where changes could have the biggest impact. “Of course you’ll see some small tweaks that can be made, but typically it’s easiest to repeat the current process electronically and then change the flows or activities to be more productive.”
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