People Process Technology Blog

What Books do you intend to Read in 2010?

Posted by:  Jonena Relth, President and Leadership Evangelist

 

As we say goodbye to 2009 and move into 2010, I hope we’re all building a “must read” list of books to help us grow professionally and personally. For some of us, reading one type of book or another is more of a chore than a way to relax and stretch our mind.  

 

Our granddaughter is 16 months old and gleefully jumps up onto our lap at the mention of reading to her. She doesn’t care if it’s Dr. Seuss or the sports stats, she just enjoys the time hearing new words and looking at the pictures.  

 

My wish for my staff, our customers, family and friends is that we reach back to the days when we couldn’t wait to sit down and devour a book.  

 

Please let us know what books we should add to our lists.

 

Happy New Year!  Jonena

Why Would Experienced CSR's Tell New Hires to Forget What They Learned in Training?

Posted by: Dr. Barb, aka Dr. Barbara Austin

Congratulations!  Your call center has terrific new-hire training using online procedures to help them learn their jobs.  So why aren’t they using the procedures?  Even worse, why do your experienced CSRs tell the new ones not to even bother with the published procedures? 

 

We spend a ton of money training new hires on online operational procedures. I once overheard an experienced rep tell a new hire, “Forget what you learned in that class, I’ll teach you what you need to know.” I could have screamed. Why would the experienced rep tell a new person this?

DR. BARB’S ADVICE

Procedures housed on an online reference (OLR) system can be very powerful performance and training tools, IF the user has confidence in the OLR. Your experienced rep may be telling the new hire that something is wrong with the procedures or the system doesn’t work well.  Let’s investigate your procedures.

Are the procedures correct?
Without question, the biggest reason CSRs fail to use online procedures is a lack of confidence in the accuracy of the procedure. For example, the CSR searches the OLR for a procedure. The search results in out-dated or inaccurate information. Just a few of these instances will guarantee that your CSRs will find alternative methods to locate information. Bad procedures on your OLR are the death knell for continued use. Generally these bad procedures are on your system for several reasons.

Old, out-dated procedures were uploaded just to have a procedure online – better to have something than nothing – right? In this case, having something, i.e., bad procedures, is worse than having nothing because users won’t waste their time searching for procedures they can’t use. No confidence = no search.

Someone has written the procedure without using a systematic subject matter expert (SME) review process. The procedure lacks “best-practice” perspective if only one person writes and reviews it. Also, the user does not buy in to the value of the OLR because they weren’t involved in the development process.  Procedures are rapidly changing, and rewrites are not keeping up. Now we’re back to the out-dated dilemma.

30,000 feet or ground level?
Six Sigma’s horizontal flowcharts turned into procedures depict a systematic flow of tasks, not steps within a task. While these maps are very valuable for evaluating overall processes, these flowcharts add extraneous information to procedures, such as which database information flows through. Frankly, users don’t care. CSRs need accurate, step-by-step procedures to complete the task at their level. They want to know which screen to use and what information to input. High-level flowcharts are useful for managers to view the overall flow of tasks, but procedures must be written with users’ needs in mind.

I'm a proponent of Lean over Six Sigma, but more about that in a later blog.

 

Our Workforce is Changing - How Will you Manage in the Coming Years?

Posted by:  Jonena Relth, President and Leadership Evangelist

Indeed our world is changing and so is our workforce.  Please take a few moments to view this video and let me know what you think. 

 

 

Thanks! Jonena

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smart Change: Healthcare Intelligence

Posted by: Peggy Salvatore

“Now or never.” These are the words of the President of the United States on health reform. Today, we in America are faced with making critical decisions regarding the future of our healthcare system. We all have opinions about how to improve our system to serve more people, make it more affordable, and improve the quality of care. Our opinions are almost always based in personal experiences, such as when you took your child to the ED or your mom to the oncologist.

With a nod to the fact that this is an incredibly complex issue and there is no simple solution, some changes to our current system will simply be smarter than others and net better long-term results.

Ponder a personal experience and consider what could have improved the interaction with your physician, hospital or pharmacy. All politics is local, and all healthcare is – ultimately- personal. Think about it.

What is the best experience you’ve had? The worst? The one you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy? And what could have made it better?

Here is where I’ll start to beat my personal drum: electronic health records, when fully integrated and secure, will solve many quality-of-care issues, lower system costs and, by extension, make care accessible to more people.

How would your complete medical record, accessible to all your caregivers, have affected your experience in the health care system?

Smart change requires intelligence. We have the electronic capability to gather good intelligence and use it. Estimates say it will take a full generation to put enough medical data online to reap the benefits of our investment. “Time’s a’wastin”. The government’s offering the money to make it happen now. So, how ‘bout it?

Peggy Salvatore has been developing managed care and healthcare reimbursement web-based training programs for the healthcare industry for 10 years. She also writes eLearning programs on general business topics such as time management, project management and leadership. Prior to that, her background includes extensive research, analysis and writing for professional journal articles, white papers and executive background briefings on a broad range of health policy issues. She was a political reporter and columnist and covered the 1988 Republican National Convention before leaving daily journalism for the business world. She holds an MBA with a concentration in strategy and economics.

Stop The Train, Senator Kennedy! I Need To Go To The Potty!

As President of TBD Consulting, I am pleased to introduce you to our newest guest blogger, Peggy Salvatore, whose concentration will be on healthcare.  Coming Soon: A new healthcare blog that you can sign up for feeds to learn about the latest news and Healthcare Intelligence information.

 

 

 

Peggy Salvatore has been developing managed care and healthcare reimbursement web-based training programs for the healthcare industry for 10 years. She also writes eLearning programs on general business topics such as time management, project management and leadership. Prior to that, her background includes extensive research, analysis and writing for professional journal articles, white papers and executive background briefings on a broad range of health policy issues. She was a political reporter and columnist and covered the 1988 Republican National Convention before leaving daily journalism for the business world. She holds an MBA with a concentration in strategy and economics.

 

From Modern Physician Alert: HELP Committee approves Kennedy healthcare reform bill

 July 15, 2009 10:42 a.m. EDT

Breaking News

 The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 13-10 along party lines to approve Sen. Edward Kennedy's comprehensive healthcare reform bill, the Affordable Health Choices Act.

Stop The Train, Senator Kennedy! I Need To Go To The Potty!

I am convinced that we are never more impressionable than when we are 2, 3 and 4 years old. Some of those very early memories, conscious or not, imprint forever. We have reactions at 50 years old that stem from, well, our brain stem, a place forever altered by significant emotional events when we were too young to filter them or categorize them logically into something we could process rationally. 

One of those events for me was a very comical moment when I was 4 years old. *How long ago was that? Way back before Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, so don’t ask!* In any event, our family mud room contained an open steel-tubed coat rack with a shelf on the bottom for shoes where my 2-year-old sister and I would sit to play a game called “train.” As the older sister, I got to be the engineer and drive the train. She obediently sat behind me and rode along as we rocked the coat rack back and forth in a swaying, train-like motion. One day, soon after her potty training had taken effect, she felt the urge to use her new bathroom skills while we were chugging along. But being a good passenger, my sister didn’t disembark while we were in motion. She wailed from behind me, “Stop the train! I need to go potty!”

Forever etched in my memory is urgent cry of “stop the train!” to avert an impending disaster. Today, as the headlines blared that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D. Mass) pushed a health reform bill through the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, I could hear the plaintive cry from the back of the coat rack to “stop the train!” It is that sense of impending disaster that lurks in my brain stem leftover from my years as a coat rack engineer.

The health reform bill is over 1,000 pages. Who has read them? Who understands all of the implications among the tons of verbiage planted by hundreds of wonks in the leafy, lurking monster that is the Kennedy health reform bill? Who can extrapolate the myriad unintended consequences of those implications? Is it just a coincidence that the acronym for the Senate committee is HELP?

Just asking…

 

Clinical Transformation Efforts Bolster Healthcare Organizations

Posted by:  Lynnda Joyce, Manager of Business Development

 

According to CNN, it’s “Black Friday” as I write this blog. The stock market has officially “crashed” losing 20% of its value in a week. Unemployment rates are rising and corporate profits are shrinking.

                                                                                                                                             

But there is good news out there too, folks!  The healthcare industry remains strong and I’m happy to say that we’re doing our part. TBD Consulting has been called upon to drive organizational transformation efforts since our inception in 1991. We’re a full-service consulting firm specializing in employee performance improvement. We create solutions to improve performance management, employee engagement and process effectiveness - tangible business impact, not just trategies.                                                                                                             

We’re proud to say that we’ve been here for our healthcare clients who are implementing clinical transformation.  Our goal is to help them meet their goals!  Whether it be implementing a new electronic medical records system, improving call center effectiveness,  streamlining work process re-design, developing time-sensitive documentation and training, or driving cultural and organizational change, TBD  has the people and experience to help ensure your clinical transformation is complete and long lasting.

 

I invite you to pass this information along. There’s no need for anyone to reinvent the wheel; we thrive on helping our customers succeed!