Overview

This course is best suited for individuals currently in the healthcare sector, as a provider, payer, or administrator. Individuals pursuing a career change to the healthcare sector may also be interested in this course. In this course, you will learn about the importance of successful execution and management of service innovation. The course focuses on the internal management of business processes necessary to deliver improved services to customers and patients, increased profitability, and build long-term customer loyalty and engagement. You will experience elements that are critical for the effective execution, implementation, and evaluation of the various strategic aspects of achieving organizational goals, with an emphasis on the initiatives and key organizational change elements. Through guided project work, you will have an opportunity to apply these concepts to services and internal business processes at your own organizations. Additionally, the course has been designed to help you become familiar with a framework of service and process redesign.

Syllabus

The Healthcare Ecosystem

This module begins with an overview of the course and the process improvement project. Next, you will learn about the new processes and technologies that healthcare innovation can bring to improve the customer experience. You will explore healthcare ecosystems and the challenges that healthcare organizations face. You will then begin work on your process improvement plan by laying the foundation and specifying the context in which your process occurs. You will begin researching and exploring organizational processes that could benefit from process improvement and how to begin planning for those process improvements.

Organizational Culture

The exact definition of organizational culture is debated: Is it the patterns of behavior of employees? The language and jargon used? The types of communications, actions, beliefs, values, and traditions of the organization? Organizational culture is all of these things, as well as how these things interact and combine to determine the degree to which staff, customers, and stakeholders identify with the organization. In healthcare organizations, the patient population drives much of the organization’s culture and success. Understanding (ideally informed by data analytics) the culture is critical to understand when considering implementing a new change or process inside that organization. This module will describe the extent to which the organizational culture represents the foundation on which excellence customer service is built and can be improved upon. Additionally, you will begin to expand on your process improvement plan by identifying the the operational process that you would like to improve or redesign throughout this course.

Planning for Process Improvement

In process improvement, the term "operational management" is used to describe the planning, design, implementation, and continuous monitoring of the provision of services. Operations managers in healthcare, like in every industry, have responsibilities in both strategy and day-to-day operations to ensure that the services provided are well managed so that the organization remains competitive. Processes must be well-designed, aligned, and optimized to better support the patient journey. In this module, you will review the early stages of process development while focusing on approaches to planning for process change. Next, you will engage in process mapping and identify the redundancies, workflows, handoffs, and subsystems involved in processes. You will create a model design, and plan out the initial deployments of improvements.

Measurement and Evaluation

In this module, you will continue to develop your process improvement plan but integrating a strategy for data collection and analysis to support your decision-making. You will explore the role data plays in decision making and how to articulate your organization’s plan for process development. You will identify different criteria for active and passive data and how you can apply different data metrics to process improvement.