“Our goal is to give you four little adjustments you can make to your Hospital Value Analysis Program that will give you a better flow and free up more time for you to handle the more challenging projects in your VA Program.”
Value analysis is taking on a life of its own in healthcare organizations throughout the country which is important as we are seeing the true value of value analysis towards the goal of cost, quality, and improved outcomes. With this comes a lot more communication, documentation, research, and validation as well as short and long-term follow-ups. To handle this, we need more time and better systems, strategies, and tools to still have enough time and resources to make all the necessary work happen while also being able to manage those special projects and tasks that go along with VA duties.
Our goal with this article is to give you four little adjustments you can make to your Value Analysis Program that will give you a better flow and free up more time for you to handle the more challenging projects in your VA Program.
1. Don’t Make Value Analysis Team Meetings “Working Meetings” – Too often, value analysis team meetings are used as “working meetings” which means that all the details are worked through in that meeting which will inevitably chew up large chunks of precious time in your monthly meetings. Value analysis team meetings should focus more on making decisions, establishing new projects, and reporting results of existing projects (e.g., what happened on Project A, B, and C since the previous meeting and what the next steps will be). If your meetings include handing out products around a table, inviting vendors into the meeting to present, or diving into major details of any project, then you will want to move them outside the VA team environment to be handled outside the meeting. Value analysis team meetings should be no longer than one hour in length. If your meetings are running longer, you may want to take a step back and see what is pushing them to go longer.
2. Establish Your Required Information and Criteria and Stick to It – I cannot tell you how many times the new product requesters at organizations fill out the New Product Request Forms but leave out vital information for the value analysis leaders and teams to even process them. If you are having this issue, then you need to build in the requirements to your new product request forms/software with hard stops if they don’t provide you with the information you are looking for. Some organizations get pushback on these as those new product requesters tend to think it is supply chain’s job to find out all of this information.
Supply chain and/or the value analysis manager receiving a new product request with little or vague information that does not fulfill your basic requirements for the new product request evaluation are not responsible to fill in the blanks. Why? Because they are not the subject matter experts or stakeholders but facilitators of the health system’s value analysis process. The responsible new product requesters are the stakeholders that must provide this information in the context of its use within the procedural and/or departmental level otherwise functions and features will clearly be missed.
3. Move to Bi-Weekly or Twice Monthly VA Team Meetings – With the amount of new product requests, contract conversions, recall/resiliency fixes, standardization, and cost management initiatives, the VA team agenda gets quite full and busy if there is only one meeting a month. We have always encouraged a bi-weekly meeting structure which our clients have found to be easily workable, and they get more done in less time. Why can they get more done? They get more done because they establish a biweekly flow and don’t have the long lag time on projects and new product requests that can easily get strung out in a monthly meeting format. Imagine having to wait 30 days for updates on a major project or even new product requests. Thirty days is too long in these fast-paced times.
4. VA Leaders Should Have a Debrief After Every VAT Meeting – VA team meetings have a lot going on in them and the VA leaders are right in the thick of it. There is a good chance that they will miss some vital points that the others may have picked up on. Plus, it is good to discuss the positive things that happened in the meeting and what could be improved upon. This way you can continually improve your team’s performance with just a quick 10-15 minute debrief after the main VA team meeting. This keeps all your VA leaders on the same page as they all have different focuses and responsibilities in those meetings.
There are always little adjustments that you can make to your VA Program that make a world of difference to you, your VA teams, and the end users of the products, services, and technologies. There is no need to reinvent the wheel by having a wholesale change of your entire VA process but instead look for these little things that can lead to big improvements. The big takeaway here is to buy you more time to do the most important things for your teams.
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