Process Improvement Methods and Proposal

The objective of strategic capacity planning is to provide an approach for determining the overall capacity level of labor-intensive resources.

The Michael R. Zent (MRZ) Integrated Healthcare Center was established in January 2006 to provide comprehensive and integrated healthcare services to individuals with mental health illness in Phoenix Arizona. The integration behavioral and physical health services across the continuum of care provide a seamless care delivery system that offers patients a holistic care based on their psychosocial needs and diagnoses. Achieving a sustainable efficient and effective integrated care program requires multiple evaluation and modification of operational and administrative processes using a Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) methodology.

The improvement effort may involve the whole business or a specific process in manufacturing, service, or office work. Most successful firms have become adept at making small, continuous improvements to their business processes as an on-going activity for every employee. It

Sixth the executive management team must define the procedures that all employees and essential vendors will use during emergency situations. Seventh, the employee training team must define and execute an awareness campaign that properly informs each employee of their role within the DRP/ECP plan and confirm that employee's understanding of their role. Last, the emergency management team’s members must maintain documentation of the DRP/ECP plan including updating when needed, changing the plan to meet organization changes, and recording of observations post plan execution.

St. Vincent’s Medical Center, a 501 bed facility located in Jacksonville, Florida, provides general medical and surgical care to the North Florida Region. St. Vincent’s admits over 26,000 patients annually. The average occupancy rate is approximately 84% with the Emergency Department (ED) peeking at 100% for approximately 4-12 hours daily. The hospital is struggling with availability of bed space. This shortage of available beds creates a bottleneck in the ED on high census days. Bottlenecks are created in the ED when there is a shortage of inpatient beds to place admitted ED patients. Thus, patient flow, or throughput, is becoming more and more important.

As a hospital, quality care should be a priority for patients that are going to be treated for a sickness, or any type of procedure that is going to take place. A lot of times a patient gets an infection while they were at the hospital, on top of being treated for what they original came in for. Health facilities should be environments of healing, which they are, but they also have tons of various types of germs and infections, which grasp onto individuals that have weak immune systems/are sick. Some infections that are at hospitals are Tuberculosis, VRE, VAP, C-Diff, UTI, and MRSA. Preventive measures to stop the spread of the infections is lacking tremendously in the work and aim to provide safety for all patient’s health. The work

Managing demand and capacity: MGH could forecast the demand and research the bottlenecks in each area of process flow diagram (Exhibit 8) such as surgery room, Ellison 8 rooms, SICU floor bed, and other hospital beds. Based on the research, they can increase or decrease the resources such as staff or beds or even expand the facility. They need the data to forecast and manage the capacity. Without the data, it is impossible to manage the capacity. So MGH need to start collecting data to better manage the demand and available capacity. However, this would not help solve the current immediate problem in hand to improve the process and reduce costs.

A quantitative study conducted by Lifvergren, Gremyr, Hellstrom, Chakhunashvili, and Bergman (2010) analyzed the experiences and from a hospital group during a three-year period after the introduction of Six Sigma. It reports on 22 large Six Sigma improvement projects, their results and influence on other improvement activities. The study shows that 75% of the completed projects reached their goals within 18 months. The average net cost savings per completed project/year was $55,300. Overall, the results showed that Six Sigma is a useful concept when trying to improve healthcare processes. They recommend that Six Sigma should be an addition to the improvement practices used in healthcare development initiatives. It was also observed that the Six Sigma program can create much organizational pull regarding quality management and improvement efforts if teamwork is applied.

There are constraints on capacity management and these are normally Time and Capacity. Time may be a constraint where a customer has a particular required delivery date. In this situation, capacity managers often "plan backwards". In other words, they allocate the final stage (operation) of the production tasks to the period where delivery is required; the penultimate task one period earlier and so on. This process helps identify whether there is sufficient time to meet the production demands and whether capacity needs to be increased, albeit temporarily.

To address these complaints and improve performance of the emergency department the Six Sigma Team must understand process improvement proposals.

Brassard, Michael, and Diane R. (2001). “Sailing through Six Sigma: How the Power of People Can Perfect Processes and Drive down Costs”. Marietta, GA: Brassard & Ritter, 2001.

Capacity planning is a necessary function of an organization to ensure that the highest rate of output is reached through the current processes taking place within an organization. These strategically defined processes must have the ability to provide flexibility to meet future capacity demand, whether due to opportunity growth or adjustments to make decreases to maximize profits. “Capacity decisions related to a process need to be made in light of the role the process plays within the organization and the supply chain as a whole, because changing the capacity of a

implementing in real life situation. Our main goal or hypothesis of this research was to check if performance metrics improve if process improvement conditions are implemented in current state model. In current CIMS simulation results show that performance metrics can be improved by implementing condition 3 of process improvement.

To implement the above management technique; business process improvement, for Five Below, Inc., it would be best to start with forming a process improvement team, instruct them and or train them in regards to business process improvement (BPI), and then create a plan of implementation. Utilizing information provided by Doss and Kamery (2006), there are steps that are needed. The first step of implementing business process improvement, the improvement must be organized. Organizing consists of constructing understanding, commitment, and understanding, which would include training, communication that is effective, a definition of what customers require and an examination of processes. The process must be understood, which this would be the

Process improvement is a fundamental to business management.  If you run an operation (and all businesses do, one way or another) you are reliant on two things: