Move Fast, But Know When to Slow

Here at Singola Consulting, we thrive in a fast-paced environment and love the organizations that want to make changes, update their technology, and provide an ever-better patient experience, but sometimes after doing an assessment we end up being the ones to put the brake on.

When building anything, a solid foundation needs to be in place to support everything that goes on top of it. The same is true for healthcare organizations: the most high-tech EHR or the most advanced telephony can only perform properly with effective and functional processes in place. By ignoring process improvement, the investment in a centralized contact center or an EHR system will never be realized.

Let’s take contact centers. When effective, they can actually be a revenue generator. (It’s true!) But they can’t be effective without the proper foundation. Before centralizing scheduling, for example, all departments of the organization have to agree to the same scheduling protocols, approve the same appointment types, and the clinicians need to buy in. These goals take time and require clear communication between all of the stakeholders, but they set a clear path for success.

It’s hard for us to be the ones asking to slow down; that’s just not our style. But we’ve worked with poor processes before, and we know firsthand that automating a bad process only speeds up the inefficiency and poor delivery of service – especially for the patients. Taking time to coordinate workflow means patients can easily access the care they need, and that is something worth slowing down for.