Pace Cardiology Showcase: Edith Dell, Operations Manager

Pace Cardiology brought Lean in because they wanted to identify some of the inefficiency. They do a lot of work with patients and they wanted to make sure that patients satisfaction was high and to reduce wait times. So they did a process walk from start to finish, from the time of a patient referral to the time the patient leaves the clinic. Here is what they found:

“We found that our wait times were because we had a few bottlenecks in our process,” says Edith Dell, MS CGC, Operations Manager. “One of those bottlenecks was waiting for an ECG before the patient sees the physician. We also saw that there were some bottlenecks before the medical assistant had their interaction with the patient and as a result one of the very good ideas that we had was to combine those two processes. So now our new station that we have includes an ECG as well as the medical assistant piece. So we have reduced our wait time in that regard and as a result our patient satisfaction scores have increased.”

According to Edith Dell’s words, one of the things that they did was standardizing the process in which the patient information is being collected.

“So we wrote our Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs, we then at the same time created new work stations that were outside of the physician consultation rooms, and we then decided what date to do the transition on, we prepared our staff, we had a Lunch and Learn meeting and walked them through what the new process was going to be like and gave them the opportunity to ask questions and make sure that everybody was comfortable. And on the day of transition, which happened to be early July, we made sure that our rooms were ready and we had our staff start working in those rooms. To follow up with the transition we monitored our wait times for several days in those early periods and noted that our wait times were actually really down in comparison. So in the past when patients waited up to 25 minutes before they could see a medical assistant, now they were waiting five to nine minutes so it’s a drastic decrease,” Edith Dell says.

“Canada Health Net came in and assisted us with walking the process, identifying what was inefficient in our process, making sure that we were looking at the items that had the biggest impact on our service and addressing those items first,” she points out. “They helped us to collect the important key performance indicators and moved forward with what the best action plan would be to improve those numbers.”

“The other piece that we noted was within our chart preparation component of our workflow – there were a number of retouches or rework. We ended up standardizing the work itself (writing a Standard Operating Procedure), and reduced those touch times from 3 to 4 to wanted 2. Which means that we are working more efficiently and ensuring that we are not wasting time in ways that isn’t necessary,” she concludes. “I think a number of clinics could benefit from Canada Health Net coming in because we all have inefficiencies in our processes and looking at those inefficiencies is a good way to improving services and increasing your satisfaction of your customers which in our case are patients.”