Improving clinical efficiency at Eugene
At Eugene we custom build our own internal Patient Management System called “Genie” so that we can provide the best care to the most amount of people.
A part of our mission at Eugene is to be able to provide the best healthcare service we can to the most amount of people. It’s a combination of giving genetic counsellors super powers 🦸♀️ and allowing Eugene customers to help themselves through the process where they can.
The way we measure our efficiency is by measuring the amount of clinical time spent serving each member. There’s one exception! We exclude customers with complex results from our calculations because we want to make sure that they’re given as much time as they need.
Most of the time we want to save is in the administrative work of processing an order that clinicians have to do — and a lot of that time is saved through process improvements built into our custom built Patient Management System, Genie. The neat side effect of these meetings is that they bring the clinical and technical team together for a fortnightly pow-wow brainstorm that results in continuous and rapid process improvements.
1. The busy-ness metric
At the beginning of each fortnightly meeting we do a busy-ness check-in where we discuss how busy each member of the clinical team has felt. It’s purely subjective and from a technical point of view it’s a bit of a litmus test of how our tools are behaving. If the counsellors feel busier but the workload hasn’t increase is it due to software usability? Is there something in the process that’s causing unnecessary stress and getting in the way of their clinical workload?
2. Minutes per order
Counsellors log their time totals using Toggl and those times are merged with Genie data once a fortnight using a simple tool we built to report on ops efficiency data. Each line item can serve as a discussion topic and provide structure to talk about how the fortnight went.
3. Actions and discussions
At the tail end of each meeting we open it up to discuss any technical or process issues that have come up in the last fortnight. We brainstorm and come up with ideas and enhancements to bring the numbers down and remove bottlenecks. This is personally my favourite part of the meeting and one of my favourite things about working at Eugene. It’s cross functional collaboration in a bit-sized 15 minute chunk of intensity.
4. Rapid development
After the meeting is over the clinical and tech teams go off and action as many of the tasks as possible. We’ll often ship 2–3 new features in Genie that same afternoon!
The result?
This is one of the processes that have helped us build a deeply integrated team of clinicians, programmers and designers. Every month we’re able to provide a high level of care for more and more people whilst finding clever ways to automate some of the boring, administrative stuff.
Interested in being a part of a team that builds tools for delivering awesome healthcare experiences using modern tech? Head over to https://angel.co/company/eugenelabs and get in contact with us.
