5 Steps to Improve Your Hospital Value Analysis Studies with Focus Groups
There are a few key steps in every value analysis study that you conduct that should never be missed, ignored or be forgotten. One of the most important steps that is often overlooked in our rush to get our VA study done, is for us to listen to the VOICE OF YOUR CUSTOMERS so that you can clearly understand their wants, needs and desires prior to re-engineering any of their products, services or technologies.
This chore can best be accomplished with surveys, interviews and focus groups. However, I have found that the most efficient and least time consuming way to gather your customers’ critical-to-quality requirements is with FOCUS GROUPS. Louise Lee of SmallBiz Magazine tells us that there are 5 vital steps you need to know about when you are conducting focus groups. I have listed these steps below:
1. Do Your Homework
You need to develop a list of questions beforehand as conversation starters, but your questions should be broad enough to encourage discussion. A good way to start off is to ask your customers how they use the product, service or technology that you are studying. This will break the ice and get the dialog going!
2. Find the Right People
When you’re conducting a focus group not only invite customers, stakeholders and experts to participate in this exercise, but also ask a few non-customers to your session, this can help to give your focus group members some perspective and keep them grounded.
3. Choose a Location
If possible, have the location for your focus group as far away from their work centers as possible. In doing so, you will eliminate most distractions, interruptions which will shorten the length of your session.
4. Pick a Moderator
Most focus groups can last as long as two hours, and participants can be combative, blunt and critical of your efforts. Consequently, if you don’t feel comfortable in this environment have one of your hospital’s facilitator’s moderate your focus groups.
5. Discuss Results
Once you have completed your focus group, analyze your findings. Look for themes and ideas that stood out in the discussion, and see how you can use them to guide your value analysis study. And be prepared for negative feedback about your focus group, since most people in your hospital don’t like change.
As you can see, conducting a focus group takes time, planning, and analysis to truly comprehend the VOICE OF YOUR CUSTOMERS in any VA study that you conduct. From my experience, conducting focus groups as an integral step in your VA studies will improve the quality of your studies 10-fold. As an added benefit, it will clearly demonstrate to your customers that you really are interested in their opinions, comments and advice by your actions and subsequent results.
Incentivize Your Physicians to Save on the Cheap
There has been a lot written about “Pay for Performance” (PFP) programs to incentivize your physicians to save, but very little has been written about how successful it can be while spending very little money.
That’s what I’m hearing from the marketplace; it doesn’t take a lot of money to incentivize your doctors to save. All you need to do is to find out what products, equipment, training, technology, staff, etc., that they desire to do their work more effectively and productively, but don’t have these resources now. Then offer to purchase or obtain one or more of these “wish lists” items as an inducement for them to save money for your hospital, system or IDN on a particular initiative that you are proposing, such as, orthopedics, neurosurgery, cardiology, etc.
The operative words here are that these incentives must effectively and productively improve your hospitals operations. You don’t want to give away incentives that are just NICE to have but are not required. They must actually be beneficial to your hospital and your physicians to be a win-win scenario for all involved parties.
Naturally, these “Pay for Performance” programs can’t be arbitrary, ill-defined or unverifiable. To the contrary, they must be highly organized, truthfully measured and value-based. For example, you might find that your cardiologists have been requesting a new piece of equipment in their capital budget valued at $28,396, but it has been denied for years. Your task then is to have your cardiologist agree — in writing — that they will be required to save three times ($85,188) the value of this equipment by assisting you in the evaluation of your hospital’s pacemakers and difibrillator’s cost, product mix, and applicability for this new equipment to be approved for purchase.
Considering you would have a minimum return-on-investment for your hospital of 200% for this hypothetical project, I believe that this is what I would call “savings on the cheap” when you consider doing nothing is costing your hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in lost opportunity costs.
So don’t be apprehensive about incentivizing your physicians to save (it’s a good business practice), since it is one of the best investments you can make with your hospital’s money. Keep in mind, your physicians have no incentive to save money today — unless you give them the incentive to do so!
Supply Savings Comic – Supply Benchmarking
NEW SUPPLY SAVINGS COMIC!
Stretch Goals Can Lead to Breakthrough Thinking!
A goal by definition is an objective we want to reach, but a “stretch goal” is quite different as defined by Jack welsh, the former CEO of General Electric. He says that stretch goals “are essentially stimulating the staff to create goals that, given the current situation and what is known today, appear beyond their reach or otherwise unattainable. This is getting the employees and or managers to conceive of things that are at a magnitude beyond their wildest expectations or beliefs”
As Jack Welsh suggests in his quote, it’s in our human nature to select safe, comfortable and reachable goals. Why should you or your team stick their necks out when management is only asking the bare minimum goals from you? I see this “small thinking” attitude all the time.
I recently asked a material manager at a 238-bed community hospital what his savings goal was for next year and he told me that his senior management had set a goal for him of $50,000. By my estimate this material manager should meet this goal in less than three months — not one year. That’s not a “stretch goal”; it’s a puny, undersized, and no brainer. If I was this material manager I would at least triple my senior management’s goal to $150,000, just to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel.
If you want to have BREAKTHROUGH savings, then you need to bring about breakthrough THINKING for yourself, your staff and your value analysis teams. The best way I know to do so is for you to set “stretch goals” for every level of your supply chain operations vs. letting your senior management set them for you. Then brainstorm with your supply chain team to discover how you will meet your oversized goals.
As an illustration, one of our supply chain clients established a “stretch goal” for their department of $11 million for this fiscal year, although they didn’t know how they would make these savings happen when they committed to this goal. That’s when their supply chain team honed in on their utilization misalignments with our assistance and found $15 million dollars in new potential savings. If they would have settled for a so-so savings goal instead of establishing a stretch goal, they wouldn’t have found these big savings opportunities! With breakthrough THINKING, they are now on target to achieve breakthrough SAVINGS – not meager results!
So remember, when you are setting your supply chain savings and operational goals for 2010, don’t take the road most travel by establishing safe, easy and undersized goals. Stretch yourself, your staff and value analysis team(s) by instituting oversized goals that will lead to breakthrough thinking and gigantic results.
