Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Terry Maher, who along with heading up the Healthcare Practice is a USCCG partner and VP. He has been with the company since 1975, and over his career Terry has worked in almost every industry and successfully completed countless projects across the globe. Now, he is bringing his extensive experience to the healthcare industry and was very enthusiastic to share his plans about the growth and development of this practice with me.
What are the Healthcare Practice’s main areas of focus?
Within the hospital arena specifically, we work across the care continuum from registration and admit surgical scheduling, bed management and staffing, case management, discharge planning to billing and collections. More recently, our work has focused on surgical material utilization, surgical analytics, laboratory speed and resource utilization, and HCAHPS/patient experience improvements. Interestingly, the focus ties to the idea of the balanced scorecard. You must have great quality of outcomes, the patient must feel the TLC, and the cost performance must be there.
What are the main challenges facing the Healthcare industry right now? And how can USCCG help solve them?
Nine out of ten hospital executives would probably answer “reimbursements”. Second, in their heart of hearts, would be one form or another of government compliance or mandate, whether Meaningful Use, Core Measure, HCAHPS, or other. There is the saying, perhaps apocryphally attributed to Tolstoy “fate deals the cards, but we must play the game.” I suspect many a hospital execs would change it to “CMS deals the cards, but I must play the game.”
These new challenges are key to where our breadth of expertise comes into play, in my opinion. We have experience in highly controlled environments where government regulation and compliance is at the forefront such as pharma and the airlines, we work in environments where groups of highly educated, highly skilled people must work together as a team such as Texas Instruments or IBM, and we work in environments where price competition is fierce, such as commodities and food.
Peter Drucker said, “At a sufficient level of abstraction, all businesses are the same”. Some may consider that a stretch, but all successful enterprises must excel at coordinating information, resources, materials, processes, and human capital, and that’s what we enable our clients to do.
What benefits and solutions can USCCG offer to Healthcare clients?
When we live by the banner “Raising Healthcare Performance thru Operational Excellence”, lean operations or operational excellence can translate to tangible benefits as:
- Reduced surgical material spend through waste elimination.
- Better use of surgical suite capacity.
- Improved HCAHPS and patient satisfaction scores, and the resultant VBP dollars penalty.
- Quicker reimbursements, and reduced bad debt.
- Reduced LOS and ED overcrowding.
- Quicker Laboratory results, at lower costs.
- Reduced cost per patient day or patient stay thru more effective use of resources.
Healthcare doesn’t just mean hospitals, what other organizations can benefit from this practice’s offerings?
Our experience includes performance improvement in ambulatory surgery centers, HMO’s and PPO’s, physician practice analytics, as well as with GPO selection and performance monitoring, and with suppliers such as our work in the manufacture of custom surgical angioplasty kits and numerous pharma suppliers.
Stay tuned for the Part 2 of the interview...