Have you ever waited endlessly to see a doctor? Received the wrong prescription? Wandered aimlessly through a medical facility while searching for your desired services?
While many of these experiences prove exasperating for patients, repercussions can prove far more damaging than mere client dissatisfaction. In a healthcare climate that has been characterized by increasing regulation and intensive customer focus, these frustrations amount to dollars lost on the service provider’s bottom line.
Those familiar with the daily trials and tribulations of the Manufacturing Industry see these same woes mirrored in healthcare. Market saturation, rising costs, and increasing regulation are all ever-present concerns. Government legislation – such as the Affordable Care Act – only serves to exacerbate the market pressure on the industry.
When viewed in the same light as manufacturing, one realizes how continuous improvement methods utilized in that business segment have incredible promise to help solve operational complications taking place in the healthcare industry. After all, at its most basic level, the healthcare industry is simply an amalgamation of different businesses, each providing a different set of customer (or patient) services.
Examples of improvement include reducing Operating Room (OR) changeover time to accommodate more patients, using forecasting and demand planning techniques to improve patient response time, removing redundant processes in surgery prep, or even improving hospital layouts to create more direct travel routes for patients during treatment. Regardless of the specific outcome, these improvement methods are continually proving successful within a healthcare context and prove to be key drivers for future progress.
These continuous improvements inherently create a healthcare system that is:
- Safe
- Effective
- Patient-Centered
- Timely
- Efficient
- Equitable
At AMEND, we leverage our rich experience in manufacturing to help bring new and unorthodox solutions to the healthcare industry. By making existing infrastructures more efficient and customizing new solutions to address systemic problems, we help cut costs all along the process and thus bring that financial benefit directly though to the end user (YOU)!
