Serving individuals and providing quality care and service has always been a high-valued standard of ViaQuest. In order to achieve such success, several staff members recently attended the Academy for Excellence in HealthCare – a program designed to help health care organizations identify and solve their greatest operating challenges to improve quality care and overall experience.

The Academy, a collaboration between the Fisher College of Business (The Ohio State University) and Cardinal Health, strives to drive results that significantly reduce costs and improve patient outcomes. The program focuses on LEAN Management strategies, motivating participants to try new things and ask questions, to further improve communication and leadership.

ViaQuest staff (Hattie Grills, Director of Central Services; Katie Gallenstein, VP of Home Health; Kathy Richard, Chief Clinical Officer; Gary Butler, Program Coach and Executive in Residence in the Management Sciences department, Fisher College of Business; and Sehul Patel, Chief Information Officer) were accepted to the sixth cohort of the Academy of Excellence in Healthcare. The team attended a week of on-site classroom training geared toward using LEAN Management concepts to achieve business or operational process goals.

The team identified their goal as improving the functioning of the Central Intake Department. More specifically, they were looking to decrease turnover, errors, overtime and referral processing time. They worked alongside representatives of other well-known healthcare organizations, such as the Mayo Clinic and Mount Carmel St. Ann’s.

Already, the project has made significant change to the quality of the department and the services provided. The team continues to expand their knowledge into other areas of the business as well. In just a short 13 weeks, the project reflected the following:

• Billing errors reduced from 12.7% to 3.8%
• Overtime decreased from 17.6 hours to 9.9 hours
• Referral processing time reduced from 77.3 minutes to 42 minutes
• Improvement of overall experience for both employees and clients
• Money saved and efficiencies improved
• The project will continue to reach longer range goals in each identified area

 

“The rapidly evolving health care industry has created a new standard of excellence for the safety and accuracy of patient care. With its proven record in creating and shaping lean leaders through an operational excellence curriculum unmatched in the country, Fisher College of Business is uniquely positioned to deliver this program. As a partner and thought leader, Cardinal Health is a health care services company with a decade of experience and commitment to LEAN management and Operational Excellence. This unique partnership brings together an ideal combination of academic and industry experience that will provide participants with a pragmatic and results oriented development experience.”
-The Ohio State Univeristy, Fisher College of Business