Robert Yokl of SVAH Solutions has an excellent blog that we’ve been reading a lot lately. He graciously agreed to let us post these best practices for hospital value analysis.
1. Strategic Planning Driven
Too often, senior management forms value analysis teams and instruct them to “go save money” with little else to guide the way. This is the worst advice you could give to a value analysis team. What they really need is a vision, mission, goals, and a plan to make savings happen. Consequently, big and sustainable savings won’t happen if value analysis teams don’t have a well thought out strategic value analysis plan to guide their way.
2. Value Analysis Steering Committee
Left to their own devices, value analysis teams lose their way without the guidance of a steering committee. Your hospital’s senior management, the group most vested in seeing your value analysis program succeed, should comprise the steering committee membership.
3. Forty Hours of Training
Hospital value analysis is an art and science; therefore, practitioners need up to 40 hours of training and coaching to be proficient in this discipline. If you decide not to train your value analysis team leaders and members, you will pay the high price of only skimming the surface of possible savings and hit the wall on new opportunities altogether.
4. Outcome-Based Results
Setting predetermined savings and quality goals annually is the engine that keeps your hospital value analysis teams on track. First, it keeps you on budget and on time with your value analysis initiatives. Then it enables you to measure, manage and control your value analysis teams’ outcomes each year. The alternative is hoping that savings happen on their own without vigorous controls over your outcomes.
5. Team-Based Project Management
Most value analysis teams are really structured as committees, not project teams. This slows down their productivity, erodes accountability and promotes group think. A much better way is to consider each member of your hospital value analysis team as a project manager for each of your projects (i.e., savings initiatives) with accountability for predetermined outcomes. This one change in your team structure will transform your value analysis teams into a saving machine – almost overnight.
