ACES in Healthcare: How ACES can deliver value to your people and patients
Companies today face significant challenges including a shift in market and workforce needs, an ever-changing technology stack, new data requirements and systems, and the need to transition to a post-COVID model. With complex business processes spanning multiple teams, functions, and customers, these challenges are often compounded by ineffective ways of working. Healthcare organizations are experiencing just this — multiplied by the intersection of patients, providers, and payors and their complicated processes. It makes for a frustrating patient experience and one that is thorny and confusing to navigate.
ACES Overview
Inspired by traditional process improvement methodologies such as lean and six sigma, Slalom employs a unique framework that is tailored to tackle your most challenging business process issues and discover impactful solutions. Slalom’s approach is designed to Assess, Create, Execute, and Sustain (ACES) process optimization. This methodology helps identify value-added activities, remove waste, improve flow, and reduce variation to optimize your operations and maximize value to your customers.
Assess Phase
We start with an Assess Phase where we define value from your customer’s point of view and learn about the inputs, processes, outputs, and consumers of your current state operations from your teams. We discover pain points and identify areas of opportunity.
We address key questions such as:
· Where are the manual steps?
· Where is the re-work?
· Where is there waiting in between steps?
· Where is the extra movement of your people and/or your untapped skills?
Create Phase
The Create Phase focuses on designing the future state solution. We solicit ideas from your frontline workers and key stakeholders and brainstorm potential solutions. We also research leading practices and benchmarks against the market. Considering all possibilities and dreaming up ideas is part of the fun! With your team, we prioritize the solutions and areas of opportunity. If possible, we even test the ideas quickly and fail fast. Your teams are part of the design and bought into the solution they help to create.
Execute Phase
Once we have designed the future state process, we turn our energies to the Execute Phase where we mobilize solutions and develop implementation plans for the changes you’ve prioritized. We help your teams get started with a project plan and project charters that detail the who, the what, and the when. We establish habits to stick with it, measure your outcomes, and incorporate feedback to stand up the new process and establish mechanisms to continuously improve.
Sustain Phase
The Sustain Phase is the final stage and arguably the most important. We help your team set target goals and monitor performance. After reviewing the performance of the new process for some time, we gather feedback from your teams and customers and identify what worked well and what goals missed the mark using questions like:
· Are you realizing the full value?
· Are the improvements helping?
· Is satisfaction growing?
Then, we plan how your teams will incorporate the feedback and continuously improve.
Why Healthcare is Ripe for ACES
The national healthcare expenditure grew 4.6% to $3.8 trillion in 2019, or $11,582 per person, and accounted for 17.7% of Gross Domestic Product. Whoa, that is significant spending and appears to be continuing to grow. It is no wonder that healthcare organizations seek to remove inefficient processes, steps, or re-work to drive down cost and add value — with physicians, nurses and techs on the frontline leading the way. Process improvement has a home in many areas including patient satisfaction and defining value-based care along every step of the patient journey, from when a patient arrives for care to when they are discharged. Traditionally, there are 8 core types of waste we seek to minimize or eliminate in healthcare organizations.
Stay tuned for next week when we deep dive into ACES in action and bring real examples of how our healthcare clients at Slalom utilize ACES in their organizations.
Meet the Authors:
Sarah Reynolds is a Senior Principal in Denver’s Business Advisory Practice. Her specialty is in healthcare / life sciences with a deep passion for improving systems of care, patient outcomes and optimizing operations.
Antonio Lara is a Principal in Slalom Denver’s Business Advisory practice focusing on helping clients develop impactful solutions for their operational issues and leading the Slalom Denver ACES Process Improvement framework and capability.
Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Our healthcare and life sciences industry teams partner with healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical leaders to strengthen their organizations, improve their systems, and help with some of their most strategic business challenges. Find out more about our people, our company and what we do.
