Some of the most basic meeting management rules, if followed, can make your hospital value analysis team meetings run flawlessly. Here are the six rules that can ensure you of effective Value Analysis team meetings every time:
- Develop a Meeting Agenda: Your meeting agenda should be your roadmap for your hospital VA team meetings. They should include: agenda topics, names of presenters responsible for each topic, the estimated amount of time needed to present each topic, scheduled breaks times, if necessary, and develop and distribute agenda 24 hours before your meetings. Don’t let items be added to your agenda at your meeting unless they are an emergency or else, you might find that you never get to your planned agenda the way it was planned.
- Don’t Have Sales Reps at Your Meetings: There seems to be a common practice to have sales reps make presentation at VA meetings for products, services and technologies under consideration. This is one way to bias your value analysis studies, since these presentations are one sided and chew up valuable time in your value analysis meetings. An alternative is to assign a Value Analysis project manager to investigate the product, service or technology under consideration and report back to their VA team on their findings.
- Keep Your Meetings Interesting: Use charts, graphics, videos and demonstrations to keep your VA meetings interesting. Keep everyone involved by asking team members questions that they can’t answer with a yes or no.
- Require a Written Report if a VA project manager is absent from a VA meeting: Rather than skip an agenda item because a lead VA project manager is absent from a meeting, have the project manager provide your team leader with a written report of their progress on their VA project. This way you won’t lose valuable time on your project updates.
- Following Established Rules of Your Social Contract: Every Value Analysis team needs a social contract (i.e. put cell phones on buzz, meetings will start on time no matter what, absent members will provide reports on their projects, not doing other work at your VA meetings, etc.) to set the tone for an orderly and productive meeting.
- Recording Meeting Minutes: Be sure to have a recorder to memorialize the results of your VA meetings. This way anyone can go back to see what, when and how decisions were made by your VA team, if requested.
If you are missing any of these VA meeting rules, I can guarantee you that your VA meetings could be more effective and productive with them. Why don’t you review your hospital VA meeting protocols to see if adding one or two of the above rules could make a difference in your effectiveness.
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