By Robert T. Yokl, Chief Value Strategist, Strategic Value Analysis® in Healthcare, www.strategicVA.com
Is your executive management supporting your VA efforts?
When I first started as a value analysis practitioner, I thought I could make a difference in cost, quality and outcomes without too much executive management support. I now know, after my firm has trained, coached and facilitated over a hundred hospitals, systems and IDNs’ value analysis programs, that the highest level of performance is reached by value analysis programs and their VA teams when their executive management is supportive and actively involved in their healthcare organizations’ value analysis program. There is no substitute for this winning formula!
Too often we have found executive management giving lip service to their value analysis programs. They may not provide the time, peoplepower or support you need to be successful. More importantly, they won’t fight for you when you get into skirmishes with your department heads and managers — an inevitable occurrence with value analysis teams who are trying to end the status quo at their healthcare organization. To the contrary, if you want to be successful in value analysis, your executive management needs to be 100 percent supportive of your efforts and willing to join you in your battles, set objectives and monitor your VA team’s program against performance metrics.
For example, I once helped a teaching hospital establish its own value analysis program whose executive management appeared to be supportive of their VA teams, but then disappeared after the first few VA meetings. This left me and the hospital’s director of supply chain management to fend for ourselves. Slowly, the VA team members too stopped coming to their meetings. The director and I were about to give up on this program when the hospital experienced a big dip in revenues. Suddenly, the executive management was supportive and involved in the value analysis program again. That’s when the big savings cascaded and quality outcomes came about, without any pushing and shoving of department heads and managers to consider changing their behavior or practices to improve their hospital’s bottom line. This is the attitude you need, too, with your value analysis program.
How do you too obtain this positive mindset with your executive management team? First, you must educate them on what value analysis is about, and then get them to commit to serve on your healthcare organization’s value analysis steering committee and represent their management as a member of each of your value analysis teams. We accomplish this feat with a three-hour executive management seminar and then have our client’s executive management team participate in a half-day value analysis strategic planning workshop where all the ground rules are set by the attendees on how they want to manage and control their healthcare organization’s value analysis program. It takes some time to accomplish this, but it works!
Value analysis is a systematic team approach to cost and quality management that requires your executive management team’s ongoing support and involvement to have a successful and substantial value analysis program. Very few, if any, value analysis leaders have been successful without selling their executive management on the value of value analysis. That’s what leadership is all about!