Clinic Implementations for a Hospital Management Company
Streamlining processes and improving project management generates massive savings for local healthcare company
Goal: turn independent clinics into network providers in 90 days—or less.
Frustrated at consistently missing deadlines, a large healthcare organization asked us for help.
Client
Our client is a multi-billion-dollar hospital management company with a presence in 22 states.
Problem
Process gaps were causing the company to regularly miss implementation targets when acquiring new clinics.
Solution
Using our project management capability, we created a system where implementation now ends well in advance of rolling 90-day deadlines.
Benefit
By shaving time-to-implementation, we’ve saved our client millions in overhead.
The Challenge
When our client acquires an ambulatory clinic, they commit to an implementation deadline of 90 days from contract signing—a deadline they were frequently missing.
They had determined that the most common shortcomings were IT procurement, installation, and vendor management. An EMR vendor’s requirement for 90 days of notice to engage their training group wasn’t helping either.
The Solution
Provisions Group assigned a Senior Consultant with significant HIT project management experience to the project. With experienced leadership results came quickly.
- Improve project tracking and speed up the work that needs to be done after acquiring a clinic.
- Streamline vendor management.
- Communicate per-site implementation requirements in a clearer and more concrete way.
- Create standardized hardware packages for more predictable installation, then put in place a process to determine the package needs of each new clinic.
- Provide for EMR trainers that could be on-site with less than 7 days’ notice.
The Results
We now remain on-site with our client as an outsourced provider, and we continue to manage implementation and onboarding process a year-and-a-half after we started. On average, we bring 3 to 4 clinics up to speed each month.
A conservative estimate puts the time saved on each clinic launch at 2 weeks—translating to millions of dollars a year in missed-deadline costs.
The Bottom Line
After “managing by spreadsheet” with non-technical staff—and even engaging the primary installation vendor to self-manage the project—our client turned to us for help smoothing clinic implementation. Provisions provided feasible and practical solutions to turn a lagging process into a well-oiled—and profitable—machine.