How would you know if you have an effective hospital value analysis team? What are the characteristics of a VA team that makes them successful? And what can you do to acquire these qualities to up your value analysis game?
Here is a six-point checklist that you can apply as a test to determine where your hospital’s value analysis team or teams fall on this continuum.
Hospital Value Analysis Team Checklist
- Trailblazers: Always ready to take on new challenges or to go where no value analysis team has gone before. Ready, willing, and able to tackle tough categories like lab reference testing, telecommunications, or food service contracts.
- Self-Starters: Don’t need to be told how to approach a value analysis study. They have already developed, as a team, a repeatable VA process to follow up on each and every value analysis investigation that they are assigned.
- Committed: They are committed to the philosophy of value analysis as a tool for the survival of their healthcare organization. As such, they attend every VA meeting, welcome change, give the time necessary to their VA projects, and don’t shortcut the process.
- Enthusiastic: Enjoy their VA meetings, promote the benefits of VA throughout their healthcare organizations, and encourage their colleagues to change their habits and behaviors for the betterment of their hospital.
- Fearless: Not afraid to give their opinion on any VA topic, or to challenge department heads’ and managers’ thinking about the waste and inefficiencies in their supply streams. Ready to stand their ground, when required, to obtain the savings or quality gains that have been identified in their hospital’s value analysis process.
- Cooperative: Always ready to help a team member, colleague, or customer work through their value analysis challenges to reach the finish line. Does more than required with an accommodating attitude.
I would recommend that you employ a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest rating) to rate your own hospital value analysis team or teams’ effectiveness against these characteristics. If you fall below a rating of eight in any category, it is time to question whether you have the right team members on your VA team with the suitable characteristics.
Based on our experience, your VA team’s effectiveness will only be as good as your team members’ individualities or positive qualities. If you leave your VA team member selection to chance, you will quickly discover that you will never have the right mix of constructive characteristics to make your team or teams as effective as they can or should be.
The takeaway here is that you should not select your team members in haste, without specific selection criteria, or haphazardly. Otherwise, you will pay the price of mediocrity down the road. Don’t fall into this trap!
Articles you may like: