The Driving Results Blog is a space for MedSpeed’s CEO, Jake Crampton, to share insights about a variety of healthcare topics. Occasionally, other members of the MedSpeed leadership team will use this space to discuss matters of particular importance to them.
By Wes Crampton, Chief Operating Officer, MedSpeed
Increasingly, providers are re-thinking healthcare transportation because a single delivery delay, a mishandled specimen or a missed delivery can be costly in terms of actual dollars, impact to the patient experience and market reputation. Such errors are estimated to cost providers an average of $600-700 per error (or more). With an industry average of 500 to 1000 errors per million stops, errors can cost providers hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Shameless plug: MedSpeed’s error rate is only 38 errors per million stops).
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The best strategic partnerships develop when organizations recognize that an expert partner can be better positioned to provide a vital function in the joint pursuit of a desired outcome. The big picture is not about making marginal improvements to existing systems. It’s about collaborating to imagine new processes.
I’ve written before about Vested® outsourcing—a methodology that guides the creation of highly collaborative supplier partnerships, based on achieving mutually defined desired outcomes. When companies collaborate in a way that that aligns the buyer and supplier’s interests to business outcomes, it creates true win-win outsourcing because the parties are vested in each other’s success.
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In this new age of healthcare industry consolidation, it’s more important than ever to think about how materials, supplies and equipment are moved within your organization. Systemness enables organizations to centralize or share services like clinical labs, print shops, mailroom or other operations, with the ultimate goal of creating cost savings and synergies.
But centralization is only the first step. How those items are distributed to various facilities is equally as important because the benefits of consolidating those services could be lost if your logistics network is creating additional costs or inefficiencies.
Read more about how intra-company logistics helps organizations attain systemness in our blog post in Modern Healthcare .
We live in a world overflowing with data. I’ve written before about big data and the danger of focusing on data to the exclusion of driving meaningful insights. Without using data effectively, we can’t affect positive change.
The HealthLeader’s report, Impactful Analytics: Driving Clinical, Financial, and Cultural Change had some excellent insights on how healthcare organizations can utilize data to drive meaningful change and create value. HealthLeaders noted: “Developing operational and strategic imperatives from all that data is dependent upon analytics…Leaders are making critical decisions on the tools that will help them make sense of their data to not only drive smart clinical decision-making, but to allocate scarce resources toward gaining efficiency and competing on cost.”
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Many healthcare organizations strive to achieve systemness, but not all have been able to create “the desired future state of complex healthcare delivery systems — that deliver patient-focused, seamless and high-quality care across the many parts of a system to maximize value for customers.”
Growth alone won’t guarantee the benefits a system can achieve through scale and acting as one, integrated system. It takes work. And just like building a house, it all starts with a strong infrastructure and foundation.
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We just published the second in a series of articles that I’ve co-authored with Dave Johnson, CEO of 4sight Health. The article examines systemness and how intra-company logisitics facilitates the success of healthcare organizations to become “one entity.” Below is an excerpt from the article, and you can click here to read the full article.
Football is a “system” sport. Offense, defense and special teams function as distinct units with their own coaches, schemes and measures of success. But teams that win the Super Bowl bring those distinct units together to operate as one entity, a winning team.
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One Louisiana health system’s journey
Over the past several weeks, we have seen a number of natural disasters in the US. Could your organization survive an unprecedented natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, and eventually turn that into something positive? That’s what the Advisory Board’s “Lessons from the C-Suite” asked of Warner Thomas, president and CEO of Ochsner Health System, Louisiana’s largest health system.
Immediately following the storm, Thomas says that Ochsner and its board realized that to even maintain operations they had to think through how to get evacuated staff back into the city to relieve staff that was onsite during and following the storm. Beyond those immediate logistics, Thomas says their organization had another team that worked on their “go-forward” strategy, which included outreach to physicians to see if they were returning to the city and if they needed a place to practice. Ultimately, Thomas says that the devastation of the hurricane strengthened both Ochsner’s culture and resolve to restore and expand healthcare in New Orleans and the region.
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According to recent research from Gartner, only 27% of companies believe they offer superior service to their competitors, even though improving the customer experience is a priority for many CEOs. So where are CEOs looking for improved customer service?
The supply chain.
“The supply chain organization typically plays a secondary role to marketing in driving customer experience strategy,” according to Gartner research director Lisa Callinan. And while marketing certainly has a leading role, it is one that doesn’t supersede substance. The supply chain is all about substance, which is leading to change in forward-thinking organizations, “because the supply chain is uniquely placed to identify customers’ needs and drive better customer experiences,” Callinan continued.
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This past July, The Health Management Academy gathered many leaders from within and outside of our industry for a summit that probed “CEO Leadership in an Age of Disruption.” There were many heavy-hitters in attendance, but in particular, I thought the discussion of Google’s Eric “Astro” Teller was particularly interesting.
Teller’s official title at Google X, the company’s research and development lab, is “Captain of Moonshots.” And if that’s not a disruptive title, I’m not sure what is. (It should be noted that renowned author Thomas Friedman discussed Teller in his opening remarks entitled “Thriving in an Age of Accelerations.” Teller himself was not present.)
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Has it ever occurred to you to equate outsourcing with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It had not occurred to me either until I read an excellent post by Kate Vitasek, architect of the “Vested Business Model” who is also a professor at the University of Tennessee.
Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, defined the hierarchy of needs something like this: human beings are motivated by unsatisfied needs and certain lower needs must be satisfied before higher needs can be addressed. The hierarchy of needs pyramid starts with physiological needs at the base, then moves up to safety needs, social needs and esteem needs. The fulfillment of those needs is what leads to self-actualization.
Is your outsourcing relationship self-actualized?
In a nutshell, here is Vitasek’s comparison to outsourcing.
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