Assessments
With the need today to have the latest technology, medical services, and patient care, comes the need to periodically assess where you currently stand and how you would like to grow as a healthcare organization. With financial costs increasing today, assessments can sometimes be minimized. However, it is with utmost importance to conduct a proper assessment to ensure your organization exceeds today’s healthcare standards and thrives as an organization. Doing so will not just benefit your patients, but your employees and community as well.
The term Assessment is very general but can be categorized into many different process functions. When looking up the definition of Assessment you find “the evaluation or estimation of the nature, quality, or ability of someone or something.” In healthcare organizations we commonly see assessments conducted for patient services, employee performance/satisfaction, and information systems.
Some areas to focus on while doing a pre-assessment:
Define What Exists Today:
· Without clearly understanding what is in place today, how can you define the future? Proper documentation such as procedure manuals, hardware manuals, performance evaluations, etc should be consistently updated and archived for reference at any time. Doing so will greatly save on costs and will save hours of time when the documentation is needed for review.
· Conduct management meetings to review the documentation to ensure all parties have a full understanding of what currently exists today.
Define Future:
· Conduct management meetings to define short term goals, long term goals, needed improvements, and strategies in how to achieve these goals and improvements.
· Go over the pros and cons of each decision to anticipate what the final result will be. Once a decision is made, it is very difficult many times to go back to the drawing board.
Employee Involvement:
· Way too often decisions are made by the management team only. While the management team has years of experience and should make the final decision, it is important to involve those front line employees where the organization change will affect the workflow the most. This will ensure stronger employee involvement and produce a greater outcome at the end of the project. Plus, they may have ideas that will be better for them and the patients.
· Frontline employees are the first ones to speak to the public and are usually willing to share their honest opinion of the new processes that they are about to put into place .Therefore, making sure employees are heard is an essential part of an assessment.
Define A Realistic Timeline:
· If you haven’t completed a project similar to the one you are starting, it can be hard to assess a realistic timeline. For example, if you are implementing a new information system, how do you know how much time is needed to build, test, and train? For this example you would ask your vendors to provide you with an implementation plan which would have a detailed timeline defined. The implementation plan provided should be a plan that has been used by many organizations and should reflect an accurate timeline. Also be sure to ask if the timeline is relevant to an organization your size because it can take different amounts of time and effort depending on the size of organizations. Ask specifically about the size of the IT staff since that is another department where the type and number of employees varies greatly.
· With all the healthcare reform changes today, organizations are receiving compensation for completing projects by a certain deadline. This can be very beneficial as the costs of the projects keep increasing. Organizations should plan ahead to make sure they are able to meet the needed timeline and guidelines. It is usually recommended to forecast an extra 2-3 months to allow room for delays. The last thing you want is to not receive all the compensation owed to your organization.
Define the Right Amount Of Resources Needed:
· Does your organization have experienced staff that is capable of handling the proposed project? Will they be handling this new project and their current job? It is very important to make sure you have the right staff on the project and that they have the time to complete the project and their current job duties. Typically it is rare to find a healthcare organization that has staff underutilized.
· If the needed experience does not exist in your organization, you may need to hire experienced vendors/consultants who can lead and ensure the project is completed on time and successfully. While this can often look to be a costly option, it can end up saving your organization money because these experienced resources have the knowledge to manage the project ensuring it will be done on time and done the right way the first time.
Define A Realistic Budget:
· Define a project budget and then add to it. It is too common today that there are surprise costs, delays, or just added functionality that organizations seek to add on later. The last thing you want is to be in the middle of the project and not know how it will be financed.
Reach Out To Organizations:
· Sometimes reinventing the wheel will just cause it to keep spinning and cause delays. With today’s social technology it is easy to reach out to other organizations that have already spent the energy and time inventing new processes. Many organizations are more than willing to share their success stories. In addition, there are typically online forums that you can search discussions for projects. This is one of the best resources to tap on because you are getting an honest answer.
After your new project/change has been implemented for a month, it is a great idea to conduct a post assessment to ensure your goals that were set originally are met and that the project was a success.
Some areas to focus on while doing a post-assessment:
Lessons Learned:
· It is probably safe to assume that there were some hiccups throughout the project. Create a log of these lessons learned so that similar future projects are implemented without the same risks/issues.
· How were your vendors during the project? Would you use or hire them again?
Employee Feedback:
· Many times in projects there can be some hesitation because not everyone likes change. However, if you involved your employees from the beginning, you should expect to hear more positive feedback as they helped in the decision making process.
Patient Feedback:
· If the implemented changes affect patients, survey them to see how they feel towards these new changes.