This event put on by Harvard Business School's Club of MN , at Health East St. Joseph's Hospital, St. Paul MN offered a wonderful introduction into some truly groundbreaking work HealthEast and St. Jospeph's Hospital is doing, in my mind, to "industrialize" their services for greater patient satisfaction as well as efficient operations that may lead to higher quality as well as cost reduction.
A side benefit to attending was seeing a former student of mine from the Medtech MBA course I taught at University of St. Thomas, Adam Crepeau, who was hired to spearhead "Lean" initiatives at HealthEast after graduating from UST. Adam's experience with SixSigma techniques as an engineer in industry (Wilson Greatbatch's company) and his passion for healthcare problem solving made him an ideal person to work with teams to identify and re-engineer core processes.
Health Care Event with HealthEast CEO on Wednesday, March 18
The HBS Chapter of the Harvard Club of Minnesota is delighted to present Kathryn Correia, President and CEO of HealthEast Care System and Cathy Barr, SVP, Community Services and President Bethesda Hospital as speakers of the 2015 CEO Series.
Correia and Barr will discuss the three Cs of success in today's ever-evolving healthcare environment: courage, creativity and openness to change. HealthEast embraced Lean and discovered surprising new ways to improve processes and performance while increasing the value they bring to patients, employees and communities. They will share their expert insights into Lean thinking and its role in the success and sustainability of health care.
Time: 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: St. Joseph's Hospital 3M AB Conference, 45 West 10th, St. Paul
Sponsored by: Harvard Club of MN
Cost: $25- Seating is limited to 55
RSVP: www.harvardmn.org
Questions: admin@harvardmn.org
Sincerely,
Ann Marie Hortillosa
Co-Chair HBS Club of MN
Agenda & Karin's notes:
- Welcome by Ann Hortillosa & John Malloy, HBS Club
- Live, learn, lead and HealthEast's Lean Journey - CEO Kathryn Correia, world leader on lean in Healthcare (had sepnt time at Geisinger and Thedacare, which applied Toyota's system to Healthcare). Success = Creativity, Courage, Change, and Commitment. With "Lean," employees who do the work change the work. (Look for book "On the Mend," by John xxxx, Center for Healthcare Value.)
- Our patients, our communities, ourselves - Cathy Barr, VP Our Communities and President Bethesda. Told story of Marjorie, a new patient in a LTC facility, who experienced shortness of breath and visited the hospital 6 times in a short time. Upon talking with Marjorie, caregivers learned she was bored and anxious; she missed socializing and her cable TV shows. Staff helped her with her core issue and she didn't experience the anxiety that drove her hospital admissions.
- Improvement area visits: Model Unit, Cardiology, Readmission, Surgery Admission Status - facilitated by Lean Iniative Internal Consultant Adam Crepeau and key team leadership.
My favorite visit was to Heart Care, where RN Sue Fangel described the process they went through to determine why only 30% of patients were receiving the results from their non-invasive cardiac tests within 3-5 days (Echos, etc.) They found that Health Information Management staff could not identify Echo reports in the EPIC data, and that MD's, Echo staff, and RN's all batched work, so that results waited indefinitely in piles waiting to be processed. To fix it they eliminated batching, implemented a HIM SLA, "work smoothing" with Cardiologists for normal or no-change results, and empowered RN's to call patients with normal results. (laughter re: "why are you calling me so fast? you almost gave me a heart attack!")
