We are all looking to up our hospital’s value analysis game with more effective strategies, tactics, and techniques to improve performance. Here are four key questions that test the effectiveness of your hospital’s value analysis team(s) so that you can keep moving forward:
1. Do you have a hospital department or manager as your value analysis team leader?
It is becoming a best practice to have department heads or managers lead healthcare value analysis teams. Why? They don’t have the stigma (price vs. quality thinking) of a supply chain officer presiding over a value analysis team and they can relate much better to their members’ challenges (time, money, and resources) at a higher level.
2. Do you have an administrative champion assigned to your value analysis team(s)?
It has been proven that having an administrative champion (Vice President or above) assigned to your value analysis team(s) to guide, council, and oversee your VA team’s activities is one of the most powerful techniques for keeping your VA teams on the straight and narrow path to success. This missing ingredient is one of the reasons most value analysis teams don’t meet their full potential.
3. Do you have value analysis sub-teams working on your VA projects?
Too often, value analysis team members take on projects without creating a sub-team of customers, stakeholders, and experts to guide them through their value analysis projects. Without this formal sub-team structure in place, value analysis projects tend to be subjective vs. objective and quickly lose their credibility.
4. Do you have a 90-day timeline for the completion of all of your VA projects?
We often talk about putting time limits on your value analysis projects, or they will have a tendency to go on forever. We have found that a 90-day timeline is sufficient time to complete 97% of your value analysis projects. The other 3% will need one additional 90-day cycle to finish off their projects. Why would you want to have your value analysis projects continue any longer than these timelines?
If your value analysis team(s) is to reach its full potential, it will need organization, structure, and rules to stay on track, on budget, and on time. These four questions that test the effectiveness of your hospital’s value analysis teams’ performance are a good starting point to evaluate the state of your own value analysis team’s maturity, growth, and organization style. How does it stack up?
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