The Emendo consultants have been on-site and undertaken the analysis. Your new CapPlan system has been installed and configured. Your PIMS HL/7 data feed up and running.
Your CapPlan system has been reconciled against your Patient Information Management System. Your training is completed. You are ready to roll out CapPlan across your hospital. The message from the executive team is ‘Now you have CapPlan, reduce the length of stay!’.
A lot of hospitals simply expect CapPlan to become embedded within the hospital operations management without thinking about how the tool is going to be used. Yes, CapPlan will provide useful real-time key performance indicators and reports but this alone will not realise all of the promised benefits. How can you make sure CapPlan is going to be used to its full potential and become a huge success?
Hospitals are a collection of process and human systems and they do not lend themselves to the traditional project management methodologies. What is needed is a different approach which takes into account the key stakeholder goals and objectives and the work breakdown structure.
PiGEON (Projects in Grey Environments, Organisations & Networks) is an example of a simple, tried and tested approach to quickly define the requirements.
So when your hospital has an objective to reduce length of stay, make sure you understand the required outcomes and what needs to be done to achieve them. Start by understanding what are the required outcomes:
And then you can define the deliverables and the activities required to reduce your length of stay.
