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Tag: healthcare



Reducing paper work for nursing homes
November 9, 2016 by CELect at T-REx

The Problem: The nursing home market is facing unprecedented growth as the 76 million baby boomers across the United States start to enter retirement. Surprisingly, the majority of these facilities have not sufficiently modernized to meet the challenges brought on by this newfound demand. Specifically, over 50% of nursing homes still use a paper-based system to manage the care of their patients and store their health records. Meanwhile many of those who have switched to an electronic system are tied down by un-intuitive programs with bulky and expensive in-house servers run by companies whose customer service often parallels that of the heavily maligned cable industry.

A Solution: In 2012 BlueStrata EHR was founded as a cloud-based solution to this dire problem. BlueStrata’s digital SaaS (Software as a Service)-model system allows nursing homes to dump their paper systems and expensive servers. The platform enables homes to conveniently access their patient records, medication information, and reporting from anywhere and was built from the ground up with an easy to use interface for nurses and other home employees. Most significantly, BlueStrata is dedicated to delivering best-in-class customer service with on-site on-boarding and implementation, a 24/7 live client support desk, and an online suite of webinars and informational documentation.

The Consultants’ Challenge: Despite BlueStrata’s numerous benefits, marketing and sales dollars are limited. In order to determine how the firm can most efficiently utilize their resources to most effectively reach the largest amount of potential customers, the company has enrolled our help. We are a team of multidisciplinary graduate students from the CELect course at Washington University in St. Louis. CELect is a unique class where students perform consulting projects for start-ups in the St. Louis area as a method of experiential learning while also giving back to the community.

Our group – Robert Bailen, Rachael Lin, Michael Foland, and Tarun Sengar, are working directly with Tony Coco, BlueStrata’s president, to help advise on how to best leverage the benefits of their ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform in a targeted multi-media marketing campaign. Working alongside Mr. Coco and the BlueStrata team has been a great opportunity for us thus far. We have not only been able to witness first-hand how BlueStrata helps homes manage their workflow, but also how they save homes significant amounts of money through increased insurance reimbursements and reduction of human error.

BlueStrata is one of the recent success stories of St. Louis’ burgeoning entrepreneurship scene, which has been driven in large part due to Mr. Coco’s leadership. Mr. Coco was the former director of marketing services and brand management for Victor Technologies, a cutting and welding equipment provider. Victor Technologies was acquired in 2014 by the Maryland-based industrial firm Colfax Corp for $947 million. BlueStrata, meanwhile,  raised $1.66 million from the life science fund of St. Louis venture capital firm Cultivation Capital in August 2015. They’re continuing to grow at a rapid pace and just recently moved into new offices in Creve Coeur to house their increasing number of employees as they continue on their path to help nursing homes nationwide.

Team: Robert Bailen, MBA; Rachael Lin, PMBA; Michael Foland,Law; Tarun Sengar, MBA

Teaching & Learning
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Inventory management optimization in the healthcare supply chain
June 16, 2016 by The Boeing Center

The Boeing Center was pleased to host Marcia Howes, Vice President, Chief Supply Chain Executive at BJC HealthCare, for the final BCTIM Operational Excellence seminar of the semester.  Her presentation, titled “Navigating the Healthcare Supply Chain,” focused on the challenges of inventory management in the healthcare industry.

As evidence of their supply chain innovation initiatives, BJC was recently named the 2015 national healthcare provider Supply Chainnovator award winner by Gartner, Inc., a leading global research and advisory company. For more information on this impressive achievement, click here.

More about Marcia

Marcia has been with BJC since January 2015 and has been a Supply Chain professional for over 25 years.  She has broad-based experience in Supply Chain Operations, including past assignments as Executive Director, Supply Chain & Operations Improvement for Amgen, Inc., and Director, Supply Chain and Quality Processes for Honeywell’s Specialty Mate­rials.  She has developed and implemented Sales, Operations and Inventory Planning processes; led on-going service, inventory and cost optimization programs; and led multiple acquisition due diligence activities and integration planning.

For more content on supply chain innovation, check out our LinkedIn group.

Marcia Howes on Inventory Mangement

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Business & Research, Teaching & Learning
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Does monitoring hospital workers motivate hand washing compliance?
May 11, 2016 by Olin in the News

In a myriad of workplace settings, standard processes are key to a successful operation, ensuring efficiency and safety. For these processes to work, employees must comply. But what’s the best way to go about enforcing that compliance, and sustain it?

New research from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis shows that motivating compliance with standard processes via electronic monitoring can be a highly effective approach, despite concerns about employee backlash. However, the research also highlights that managers cannot simply “monitor and forget,” and that a long-term plan for supporting the retention of monitoring is critical. The findings were published online May 5 in Management Science.

Hengchen Dai, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Olin, along with co-authors Bradley A. Staats and David Hofmann from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Katherine L. Milkman from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, studied compliance with hand-hygiene guidelines among more than 5,200 caregivers at 42 hospitals for more than three years.

They collaborated with Proventix, a company that uses a radio frequency-based system to track whether health-care workers wash their hands. More than 20 million hand-hygiene opportunities — incidences when hand hygiene is expected — were captured; each with the potential to prevent, or spread, a hospital-borne illness or infection.

“Maintaining high compliance with standard processes is a challenge for many industries,” Dai said. “We examined hand-hygiene compliance in hospitals because this is a setting where consistent compliance is extremely important in an effort to eliminate hospital-acquired infections. This is an area where improvements can, and should, be made.”

Dai and her co-authors found that on average, electronic monitoring resulted in a large increase in hand-hygiene compliance during their study period. Interestingly, compliance initially increased, and then gradually declined, after approximately two years. When electronic monitoring was stopped, hand-washing rates dropped, suggesting that hand-hygiene habits weren’t formed.

In fact, researchers discovered that compliance rates for hand-washing dropped to below the levels seen before the monitoring began, a finding that is surprising to both the researchers and health-care practitioners.

“While we thought decreased compliance after the monitoring could perhaps be a possible outcome, we were still somewhat surprised to see the result,” Dai said. “We based our prediction on past research about ‘crowding out,’ whereby caregivers’ internal motivation for compliance may have been replaced by external forces associated with monitoring, such as the fear of penalties or punishments for not washing their hands.

“When the external stimulus of monitoring was removed, their compliance behavior declined below the initial level as both the external forces and internal motivations were gone,” she said. “We do not have the data to get into the underlying psychology, but it is certainly worth examining in future research.”

While the findings focused on the health-care profession, Dai said all managers should take note, no matter their field. While electronic monitoring is an important motivation and compliance tool, it’s a single piece of a larger strategy.

“Individual electronic monitoring is one tool managers can use to dramatically improve standardized process compliance, but that it is not a panacea,” Dai said. “Managers looking to build process compliance must think about how electronic monitoring fits within a broader system encompassing not only technology, but also norms, culture and leadership.

“Managers should not ‘monitor and forget,’ ” Dai said.

 

 

Business & Research, News
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Health administration alumni welcomed to Olin
April 28, 2016 by Nancy Barter

Washington University alumni from Olin Business School and the Health Administration Program (HAP) formally gathered in Chicago on March 15, 2016.  This event was significant as it was the first time our two alumni groups gathered together since Olin welcomed HAP alumni into its community in 2015.

HAP 2The highlight of the evening was the presentation of the Distinguished Alumni Award to Gary Olson, HA ’76, who recently retired as Chief Executive Officer of St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis.  Gary credited his degree from Washington University with giving him the opportunity to succeed in the field of healthcare.

For those who don’t know, Washington University’s School of Medicine offered the Health Administration Program between 1946 – 2008.  The program’s 1,400+ graduates have gone on to assume senior level leadership positions at hospitals and healthcare organizations throughout the United States.

There is great potential for HAP alumni to engage with Olin students interested in healthcare. Expect many more opportunities in the coming year.

Guest Blogger: Mark Reifsteck, HA ’83

Career, News
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How collaboration in healthcare networks increases capacity
April 15, 2016 by The Boeing Center

In part two of the 2016 Rosenblatt Lecture series, Jan Van Mieghem, the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Managerial Economics and Professor of Operations Management, Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business, explains how the prioritization of individual preferences (i.e., the way in which tasks are performed by healthcare professionals) can reduce throughput, or the number of patients serviced.  This lack of emphasis on collaboration and multitasking can result in decreased efficiency and, therefore, increased costs in the healthcare process.   Read full article  •  Watch part I

The Rosenblatt Lecture series was established in 2003 to honor the memory of Meir J. Rosenblatt, who taught from 1987 to 2001 at Olin Business School as the Myron Northrop Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management. A leader among faculty, Rosenblatt often won the Teacher of the Year award at Olin and authored the book “Five Times and Still Kicking: A Life with Cancer,” having battled cancer multiple times throughout his life.

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Business & Research
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Student transforms medical practice in India
March 17, 2016 by Brian AiChang

Dr. Ashley Jacob, a current Executive MBA student (Mumbai Class 1), presented at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA) 21st Innovation Conference on his successful hospital transformation which increased patient quality outcomes using innovative technology and processes to reduce overhead and patient wait times.

With a population of 1.2 billion people, India has extreme competition where medical facilities and doctors vie for customers who prioritize value, reputation, and quality. Though Dr. Jacob comes from 7 generations of Ayurveda doctors (version 7.0 as he states), he had to differentiate his system and practice in order to become the leading eye hospital since 2001.

Ashley speakingDr. Jacob instituted new policy and operational changes by implementing a new management system which put employees first and customers second. Realizing that 80% of patient interaction is outside of his control (average direct doctor interface is 7 minutes), he developed a training program to ensure his staff were certified and cross-trained to handle every task that would arise.

Additionally, he implemented a digital check-in process where patients used their thumbprint. The system would automatically alert the staff of the patient arrival, lead patients through the various treatment areas, and then send the bill and follow-on appointment reminders automatically.

Incredibly, he utilized YouTube to showcase his operation on a patient to remove the longest eye worm known which became the most downloaded medical video with over 1.2 million views, ( YouTube link ). This global reach allowed him to interact and provide honest and ethical feedback gaining a following.

The results are staggering:
• Reduction of staff (76 to 24)
• Reduction of patient wait times from 211 minutes to 48 minutes
• “Word of mouth” advertising increasing customer base from Indian subcontinent to worldwide

Innovations are not limited to just technological advances but rather a change to an existing action or process. Dr. Jacob applied innovation to mature hospital operations by daring to change the status quo. He has applied these principles, coupled with Olin’s EMBA program, to his other enterprises (financial services, education, entertainment) to continuously innovate and create value.

Global, Student Life
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