There is a great deal of research into what makes meetings (including healthcare value analysis team meetings) work, but four new ideas that caught my eye while reading an article, by Steven G. Rogelbert in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, makes a lot of sense to me as follows:
- Recognize that you may be the problem: We have observed several hospital value analysis team leaders who created their own problems. This has ranged from, micromanaging every little detail of the value analysis process to canceling meetings for no reason to not following up on team leader duties. Even innocuous things like allowing studies to go on forever when they should have ended months before can dramatically effect the performance of your teams on current and future studies. To see if you are the problem, tape a few VA meetings to see if you would consider yourself a successful and skillful leader.
- Keep meetings small: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got it right when he instituted the “two-pizza rule” – if you need more than two pizzas to feed everyone, your meeting is too large. This has also been our experience. When VA team meetings have larger than 10 people, recent studies have shown that a team’s effectiveness is reduced by 10%.
- Don’t take an hour for a meeting: Why take an hour for a VA meeting. Why not 48-minutes. And avoid running over your time limits since it frustrates your team members who have other meetings to go to.
- Do a meeting “pre-mortem”: This is a rule we advocated for years. Have your Value Analysis team leader, administrative representative and facilitator take five minutes after your hospital value analysis meeting to evaluate “what when right” and “what when wrong” with your VA meeting. If necessary, put an action plan in place to improve your VA teams performance.
We all have too many meetings to and go to that can be frustrating if they aren’t structured or managed properly. So, if you have the power to institute the changes, I recommend the above ideas that can make your Hospital value analysis meetings more productive, effective and time centric.
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