Service To Cash Improvement Challenge: Claims submitted to insurance providers resulted in an unacceptable level of denials. In these cases, service to cash transactions were breaking down. Services were provided but were either not paid for, or were paid at a level less than expected. This led to lost revenue and excessive time spent following up on denials. The objective was to reduce the number of denials and act upon remaining denials quickly, resulting in increased revenue and shorter collection. ASI Solution: Analysis of service to cash, in particular the denials, revealed that required information was often missing from billings; providers had not been adequately challenged in some denials and people submitting billing often coded in [...]

Outpatient Testing Challenge: There was an unacceptable level of no-shows and last minute cancellations of outpatient tests, leading to wasted materials, unutilized test capacity and overtime. There was also a belief that there was a high level of payment denials because pre-cert procedures were not being followed. Reduce the number of no-shows and last minute cancellations, and ensure that provider pre-cert requirements are fulfilled. ASI Solution: Telephone surveys of patients revealed that a large number of patients who missed appointments often forgot them, or were unclear about the location of the test. Some patients arrived improperly prepared because they had forgotten the preparation requirements. It was discovered that while overall payment denials for the hospital were [...]

Operating Room Scheduling Challenge: Operating room schedules were nearly full despite the fact that there were many unutilized hours. Some surgeons were not moving patients to the hospital because they could not obtain time in the schedule. Plans were being made to add another endoscopy room at a cost of $300,000. Increase the amount of time the operating rooms are used for procedures. If possible, eliminate the need to build an additional endoscopy room ASI Solution: Analysis of the scheduled and used hours revealed that many prime hours were allocated to specific surgeons in blocks without regard to the procedure load. Unused block time could be assigned to other surgeons, but typically too late to be [...]

Medical Instrumentation Challenge: A large, successful American medical instrumentation company was experiencing increasing difficulty competing with Japanese and German offerings. The company enjoyed a proprietary technology. However, the competitors were gaining market share with lower cost, more reliable products. ASI Solution: The company engaged ASI Consulting Group to help improve their Product Development Process. Enhancements to the Product Development Process included intense interactions between engineers and customers, Quality Function Deployment, Pugh Concept Generation and Selection, and a disciplined Verification and Validation Process which met FDA requirements. Verification and Validation are associated with Prototype and Pilot Fix Cycles respectively. Earlier development programs needed several Prototype Cycles to achieve performance goals and meet FDA regulatory requirements. The new [...]

Emergency Department Wait Time Challenge: The most frequent complaint voiced about emergency department wait time to the Hospital CEO was that new patients experience long waits throughout their experience. Long waits to be admitted, long waits before receiving treatment, and even longer waits in the overall treatment process. Reduce the total wait time experienced by patients and increase their satisfaction with the overall emergency department experience. There were no expectations of financial results for this project. ASI Solution: Mapping the issues that were causing emergency department wait time to be longer, ASI examine key emergency department processes. Team members were observed operations and recorded data for actual visits on all shifts. The following were discovered: inconsistencies between shifts [...]