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6 Areas of Inefficiency by ServiceSPAN
- 1. HOW TO GO FASTER AND FURTHER? Targeted analysis and innovative technology solutions that quickly accelerate revenue cycle processes. WWW.SERVICESPAN.NET IDENTIFYING 6 AREAS OF INEFFICIENCY Even after successful automation implementations.
- 2. Back Office Work Centers Back office work centers are responsible to handle the manual work that falls out of automated systems. The efficiency of this process (or lack of it) directly impacts the company’s bottom line.
- 3. “The Insidious 6” As experts for 30 years assessing work operations, and deploying innovative technology solutions, we’ve come to identify what we call The Insidious 6, six overlooked efficiency issues that are the root cause of lagging cycles times, work backlogs and lost revenue. 1. Inefficient Work Distribution Mechanism 2. Uneven Employee Workload 3. Inadequate Research Tools 4. Limited Accountability 5. Non-Value Added Work Waste 6. Lost Automation Opportunities
- 4. 1. Inefficient Work Distribution Mechanism In your operation, is work automatically received, already prioritized and pushed to employees, based on skill level and any other criteria that you deem necessary? If not, what WORK-AROUNDS have you established to ensure the most efficient distribution of work?
- 5. 2. Uneven Employee Workload Are you able to match work to available staff in real-time and in response to the business’s fluctuations and trends? What WORK-AROUNDS are in place that successfully ensure you’re getting the most out of every hour worked by your staff?
- 6. 3. Inadequate Research Tools WORK-AROUNDS designed to organize the research process, cause managers to believe this is at least one area where there is no room for improvement and no longer an area in which to consider cost reduction. 1. Are your employees frustrated, wasting time, swivel-chairing between applications? 2. Do they have ‘smart tools’ that enable them to work more efficiently and feel accomplished at the end of each day?
- 7. 4. Limited Accountability Dashboards are only as good as what they measure. Can your dashboard provide end to end information about individual and group productivity? You can’t have accountability without an efficient means of tracking, measuring and reporting on performance.
- 8. 5. Non-Value Added Work Waste How is productivity impeded when the least skilled staff cannot be flexibly utilized? Or when the best trained, most experienced staff are handling non-value work? What if work was automatically ‘pushed’ to appropriately skilled staff, ensuring best performance, more accountability and streamlined productivity?
- 9. Human factors can hinder your automation efforts. We look for new automation opportunities and identify why existing automation might be flawed. 6. Lost Automation Opportunities
- 10. Work Center Manager (WCM) Gets you to your productivity goals faster 10 SYSTEM TO SYSTEMSYSTEM TO SYSTEM INTEGRATIONINTEGRATION Connect to applications either directly (API, etc.) or through human emulation. GUI’s provide information to users on one desktop. Highest priority work items are efficiently ‘pushed’ to employees based on skill set, availability, volume and trends. WORK DISTRIBUTIONWORK DISTRIBUTION CAPABILITYCAPABILITY Automate the creation of various forms and pre-fill them so employees focus only on fields that require their expertise. FORMSFORMS GENERATIONGENERATION Desktop displays information critical to employee work and rules can decide and limit who can see specific data and for how long. TASK ADAPTIVETASK ADAPTIVE VIEWSVIEWS Managers have real-time view of information so they can efficiently assess work trends, performance and productivity. REPORTS, DASHBOARDS,REPORTS, DASHBOARDS, TIME TRACKINGTIME TRACKING Integrated desktop allows users to gather information, and make proficient decisions that move work to the next steps. . DRIVING EXCELLENTDRIVING EXCELLENT DECISIONSDECISIONS
- 11. Recognize WORK-AROUNDS that cloud efficiency issues that if addressed, open doors to greater productivity. Realize the benefits of a 50 to 100% increase in employee productivity! Make change happen… Consider who in your organization (perhaps you) is positioned to build a business case for innovative and guaranteed process improvement. Take Away Knowledge
- 12. • 1-2 days on site interview and analysis • Review and solution proposal in a week to 10 days • Rapid solution delivery 6-12 weeks • ROI enablement guarantee Typical TimelineTypical Timeline The ServiceSPAN Process & Guarantee • 1-2 day on site analysis – map optimal process • Determine target performance improvements • Identify and develop consolidated forms, workflow • Build integration overlay to disparate systems • Deploy and Implement Work Center • Train team • Measure results Analyze, Recommend & DeliverAnalyze, Recommend & Deliver 12
- 13. Julie Lancaster Director, Software Engineering & Account Relations j_lancaster@servicespan.net 720-270-4275 Dan Corcoran President d_corcoran@servicespan.net 516-639-0200 13 We welcome the opportunity… Let us demonstrate how our domain knowledge and more than 25 years of innovative technology can help you accelerate your revenue cycle and deliver better services to your customers or healthcare community.
Editor's Notes
- Slide 2 Back office work centers at Customer Service Provider companies, are under a great deal of pressure. As the processes of these operations become too complex for existing systems, manual work backlogs increase and revenue decreases. (Dan, it might be more engaging if there is individual language for both Healthcare and Telecom here to focus on)
- In just about every one of our deployments, the managers of the work centers we assess are at first surprised by the mention of these 6 issues. Yet through further analyses and discussion, they begin to realize and recognize them in their operation. We remind managers that we call them insidious because they are underlying and stealthy, and without finger-pointing, we explain that the reason they are unseen, is because they as smart, pro-active managers, sometimes with limited resources and support, have implemented work-arounds….or processes that are added to address problems where there is no other means of a solution. I’m going to briefly touch on the INSIDIOUS 6. At first, you will not necessarily consider them to be problems. But if you begin to consider the ‘work-arounds’ that you or other managers have put into practice over time, you may then start to relate to my point. A work-around is the implementation of a procedure put into practice to solve a problem that cannot be corrected with available tools and/or resources.
- The next unseen issue is the INEFFICIENT WORK DISTRIBUTION MECHANISM and it is different than UNEVEN EMPLOYEE WORKLOADS. The distribution mechanism is the automated method of actually PUSHING THE WORK TO EMPLOYEES. Ideally, in this example of a work center, is for the billing system to distribute the work directly to your employees. But, if it’s not capable, there is some risk the users would cherry-pick the easy work if they go directly to the system themselves and choose their assignments. WORKAROUNDS to distribute work that you might see in your company could include: - Having employees responsible for work, based specific criteria [Healthcare or Telecom Example] How efficient is that? - Something more sophisticated, is to import work into an Excel spreadsheet or a database where it can be filtered and sent back to employees. That sounds better. But there are problems with that as well. Ask yourself these questions about the work distribution mechanism in your work center: 1. First, does it allow anyone at anytime to pick-up where another employee left off with a work assignment? 2. Does it insure people who have specialized talents, are not wasted on non-value added work? For example, I met a manager who identified which of her people are effective at collections of $500 or more and didn’t want them working anything less, but she was frustrated that there was no way to control that. 3. Does your process group related work together? 4. Does your system make work processes more functionalized and assembly-line like, to achieve highest productivity? An efficient distribution mechanism doesn’t rely on emails, spreadsheets or simple databases. The point I’m stressing here, is that without an EFFICIENT WORK DISTRIBUTION MECHANISM, it’s impossible to ‘get the right work to the right person’ !! Did you know there is sophisticated, innovative, integrative workflow software that efficiently gets the work, filters it, prioritizes it, directs it, tracks it, measures it? ServiceSPAN says there is!
- So here we begin with our first unseen core problem, let’s look at the UNEVEN EMPLOYEE WORKLOAD. In your work center, if work loads stay even over time, there is little problem and you can ignore this slide. But, in our experience, work centers lack a dependable method of matching employees to fluctuating workloads on a daily basis. Managers without an efficient means of receiving and directing the work based on real-time information are missing opportunities to control costs and still maintain best practices. So typical workarounds that we see often include: •Training all users to do all types of work, rather than training users to specialize in 3 or less flavors of manual work. •Work processes that include cradle to grave ownership of each transaction rather than assembly line processing •Moving work to and between other groups, even though the ‘shuffling’ creates the question of whether the work is getting done on time and/or correctly. •Borrowing resources from other areas, but that can create work discrepancies and inconsistencies that go undiscovered. •Overtime… some overtime is good, too much…is not good. Having employees without enough work, while others work overtime, is a very big problem. Are you seeing the smoke yet? You may think that validating the efficiency of every work hour is impossible. ServiceSPAN says it’s not!
- Employees waste half their time ‘swivel-chairing’ to look up information in various applications in order to determine what action to take next. [Healthcare Example] Typically, they have one or more windows open into their billing systems, a document management system with an image of the original order, a lab system with results, multiple payer websites, a form- based tool to create HCFA forms, and then an Excel spreadsheet to track their productivity. [Telecom Example] (Dan, can you add here some telecom things that could be open windows?) Often they need to cut and paste information across different systems, and then again into a local database. For security reasons, some of these applications will time out every 15 minutes, requiring users to login many times during the day. On top of that, some applications won’t allow cut & paste, so users hand type order numbers, claim numbers, and comments between systems opening up many possibilities for errors. Some typical work-arounds I have seen include: [Healthcare Example] Scripts to automate some of the research, such as going to a specific payer’s website to learn the reason why claims were denied. Typically, these scripts are hard to share with employees in different work locations. Then there are graphical user interfaces designed to avoid the need to login multiple times during the day, but they are not part of an integrated workflow and require cut and paste. With all such work arounds, I rarely see two people doing the work exactly the same way, which indicates the process is ad-hoc and employees are learning from each other in lieu of a globally efficient integrated process. And lastly, when we take measurements, we learn that employees are skipping transactions they don’t want to do, and there is no record of it. [Telecom Example] (Dan, can you add here some telecom work-around examples) What if employees had efficient tools that let them work faster, better, smarter. ServiceSPAN says it’s possible!
- (Dan we’ve changed this from Limited Productivity Measurement to Limited Accountability. How should be best make this point? Also, do we need a Healthcare and Telecom approach or can the language we use cover both?) LIMITED ACCOUNTABILITY is a glaringly unseen problem, simply because it’s difficult to define and even more difficult to measure. Many companies measure accountability by counting widgets? Some have upped their game using time shifting financial information, including changes in A/R, changes in bad debt and cash received in an attempt to draw efficiency conclusions about their operations? Those are helpful measurements, but they’re too high level. For instance, you don’t know how much of Mary’s work equates to collectable cash? You may have implemented work-arounds but these are some of the issues that are keeping you from seeing the whole picture: First, performance results are skewed because they are not 1-1 transactional comparisons to Mary’s work, but are instead financial comparisons, summarized for a time period, for transactions in account statuses, touched by your work center. Secondly, [Healthcare Example] productivity measurement is not specific enough, making it difficult to pinpoint decreased performance. For example, productivity is measured in terms of accessions appealed, but not whether the appeals were successful or not. A worker with many unsuccessful appeals, appears to be more productive than the employee who made fewer successful appeals. With this lack of visibility, poor performers are actually rewarded because of skewed information. [Healthcare Example] So for example, did your work center’s success on appealing Aetna denied claims increase or decrease last month? Without tying collected cash back to the actions of your employees, you are missing out on a valuable feedback loop that could identify configuration and problems in your billing process or the computer systems of your payers. [Telecom Example] First… Second… Bottom line… Supervisors are managing back offices without the aid and support of quality performance/workload data. Without meaningful productivity data, they are unable to make informed, efficient decisions in order to optimize the most of their worker’s best efforts and time. With more visibility and control over the work and the operation, how much more efficiently could managers perform? ServiceSPAN says lots more!!!
- Dan, we need the best language to describe this slide… This efficiency issue is sometimes not even realized because the implementation or filtering process of separating out uncollectable cash does work to a degree. But it’s very difficult to calculate the cost in of products and manpower to provide and oversee the processes, the cost of continually updating them, and even more daunting is figuring out if the up front effort is ensuring accuracy in the back office. There is no way to truly control that higher skilled employees are processing the work that represents the most viable revenue, or if they’re being wasted on non-value work.
- Our last unseen issue is LOST AUTOMATION OPPORTUNITIES is sort of a culmination of the first 5. By this point in our presentation, I’m guessing you’ve begun to think about your work center and it’s productivity in a few new ways. You may have already assessed in your mind that many things are being done well. Some of you may best relate to one or two of the insidious 6, while others may be plagued by them all. Lost automation opportunities are the casualty of manual processes that have not yet been replaced with the kind of technology that bridges the gaps between your employees and your existing software applications. It was important for me to bring your attention to the work-arounds, not to point at them as inadequacies necessarily, but more to put you in a mindset of change. Dan, can you explain and then add examples:
- DAN speak to the slide.