FCMOs Optimize Workflows for Chicago Healthcare Companies

Healthcare is one of Chicago’s busiest and top-growing industries, with over 620,000 employees working in numerous healthcare companies, according to recent estimates. 

All six hundred thousand of your co-workers provide world-class medical care while perhaps facing a similar challenge. As the demand for quality patient care increases, Chicago’s healthcare companies are faced with the challenge of meeting patient expectations. Establishing efficient processes and effective communication is the crux of this. 

If your healthcare company is in a similar situation, workflow optimization could be the solution. By finding ways to work faster and cutting down unnecessary roadblocks, healthcare companies can deliver greater services to their patients while lightening their workload.

Learn how a fractional CMO can help you achieve workflow optimization and the different strategies through this handy guide.

What Is an FCMO?

FCMOs are professionals with years of experience in various areas of healthcare marketing, including patient and customer acquisition, resource allocation, and cost-effective leadership. They work on a part-time basis as contractors (billed hourly). That way, you only have to pay for the hours you need. 

If you are trying to enhance efficiency and productivity, an FCMO for healthcare workflow optimization in Chicago is the ideal person to have on your team. Here’s Jason with a bit more info about Chicago FCMOs here:

Should I Hire a Fractional CMO? Working With a FCMO in Chicago, Illinois

Fractional CMOs are experts at finding practical solutions to break down complex processes into simpler, more manageable tasks. They do this by analyzing a company’s entire process, identifying areas for improvement, and maximizing available resources.

FCMOs also offer an objective opinion on a company’s processes and assist with conducting research and analysis to create data-driven recommendations. They also help create effective strategies for streamlining your pipeline. 

What Is Workflow Optimization?

Workflow optimization is the process of coming up with ways to make a company’s processes more efficient and powerful. In other words, it’s essentially finding ways to do things better and faster while maintaining accuracy. 

Workflow optimization can be applied in many areas of a business, including administrative, organizational, or industrial processes. In the healthcare industry, this could include finding faster ways to acquire clients, compile patient data, hire new employees, manufacture medical products, and more. 

Workflow optimization doesn’t always include implementing the newest and most advanced technologies. Instead, it involves maneuvering around current workflows and eliminating unnecessary steps for greater efficiency.

By optimizing workflows, clinicians and medical professionals can promptly deliver seamless and professional-level healthcare that patients deserve.

7 Workflow Optimization Strategies

Workflow optimization takes shape in different ways and can be achieved through different means. 

Let’s briefly go over seven optimization strategies:

1. Agile

The Agile method is commonly used in software development and enhances collaboration, flexibility, and adaptability. The process breaks down your entire workflow into smaller tasks called sprints.

After each sprint, all business stakeholders provide feedback, which is applied at the end of each sprint. This method allows teams to work pace themselves through each phase, identify errors, and solve them quickly.

For more on software development in Chicago, here’s Jason with a few words:

2. Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement (BPI) looks at your workflow as a whole and pinpoints areas for improvement to boost overall efficiency. It also identifies anything that could potentially slow down processes.

Companies apply BPI by analyzing overall procedures or monitoring employee performance. There’s a technological element as well; your FCMO might use new technologies to improve or streamline different processes. They’ll likely also review your current tech to see if anything needs changing or updating.

3. Business Process Reengineering

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is essentially a complete redesign of your current operations from scratch to generate new and better results. To use a home renovation metaphor, BPR is gutting the house down to the frame and building back something HGTV-worthy. 

Many factors go into giving your business operations a complete overhaul, including what the company’s goals are with this redesign, customer input, analysis of current processes, and process mining. Companies use all this data to create entirely new processes that better align with their goals.

• Review Definition: Process mining is when your FCMO takes information from event logs to visualize and improve business processes. 

4. Lean

A Lean process is a continuous improvement method that involves looking at the bigger picture and seeing what can be excluded from the entire workflow. By eliminating waste and non-value-adding elements, businesses can deliver services to customers faster. This waste-shrinking method came from the manufacturing world, the Lean process is all about increasing innovation and decreasing non-value-adding activities. 

The Lean process is an ongoing cycle with many steps. The general breakdown follows something like this:

• Analyzing your process and identifying areas for change
• Implementing said changes
• Monitoring the effects of those changes
• Refining until you can take the desired results to your shareholders and celebrate

5. Six Sigma

The Six Sigma methodology allows companies to identify and eliminate the root causes of their inefficiencies and reduce errors, with the goal of being as close to perfect as possible. 

To be practically perfect in every way, Six Sigma follows a DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process. DMAIC spots areas for variation and goes in to save the day. 

The DMAIC process follows this general format:

• Define: Identifying a specific problem
• Measure: Measuring results from your unaltered process
• Analyze: Analyzing the specific cause
• Improve: Making the needed adjustments to fix the problem
• Control: Consistently making new adjustments to better control the output

6. Theory of Constraints

The Theory of Constraints reveals what factors are getting in the way of productivity so company leadership can start to address them. 

Think of it like finding the weakest link in the entire workflow and improving it until it no longer stands in the way of your goals. This process follows five steps, namely:

• Identify: Identifying the constraint
• Exploit: Making small changes or improvements using available resources
• Subordinate: Adjusting each step of the process to align with the constraint’s needs 
• Elevate: Continuously improve the constraint using additional resources
• Repeat: Repeating the process on a new constraint or if the current constraint still poses a problem

7. Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is the process of detecting and eliminating errors in manufacturing.

Call upon TQM when you want to streamline overall supply chain management, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure that all employees are trained to deliver high-quality goods and products.

• A Tip from Our Chicago Digital Marketing Agency: Your FCMO for healthcare workflow optimization in Chicago can help with hiring, training, and getting employees up to speed. 

TQM doesn’t have a specific approach as it is different for every company. Generally, it involves monitoring your current processes and seeing what aspects may affect product quality and improving them.

Why Does Workflow Optimization Matter?

Workflow optimization doesn’t just reduce workload for medical personnel, but it also offers long-term benefits that impact companies altogether.

Let’s go over five reasons why workflow optimization matters for your healthcare company.

Reduced Waiting Time

With workflow optimization, healthcare companies can streamline tedious administrative tasks and prevent long waiting times, giving more leeway for time-sensitive responsibilities.

This can be achieved through integrating automation tools and:

• Specialized software like CRM
• Data-gathering tools, appointment scheduling tools
• Medical billing software
• and more

Improved Customer & Patient Experience

Thanks to workflow optimization practices in place, medical professionals can provide a holistic, patient-focused experience. Prioritizing the patient’s experience first also establishes trust between both parties and increases patient retention.

By eliminating workflow hurdles, you can share timely responses and meet patients’ needs with personalized responses to their queries, including getting them the right answers faster. The patient’s overall interaction with the medical company becomes much smoother as well, from the initial search of the company’s website to receiving a treatment plan to leaving you a five-star review. 

Reduced Bottlenecks

Workflow optimization helps healthcare providers to identify potential bottlenecks and eliminate them to keep entire processes running smoothly. This also leads to faster processes, maximized resources, and satisfied customers.

Not only does this speed up the process and prevent bottlenecks, but it also makes things easier for medical staff to manage. No bottlenecks mean no stress, which ultimately leads to a more productive and well-organized workflow.

Improved Productivity

Workflow optimization solves the problem of inefficient processes, high workloads, and operational delays. Without substandard productivity bogging you down, you can say hello to productivity and say goodbye to burnout and waste. This makes it easier for healthcare professionals to deliver quality services and products.

Better productivity also leads to enhanced patient satisfaction and retention, improved team morale, and that ROI you’ve been daydreaming of. 

Cost-Effectiveness

The medical industry is one of the most resource- and time-heavy industries, so all leadership wants to save when they can. This is where workflow optimization comes in handy.

Improving and optimizing your workflow removes unnecessary steps and redundancies that use up additional time and resources. It also helps teams maximize limited resources and still administer high-quality patient care.

How Do You Optimize Workflow?

Coming up with an optimized workflow for healthcare companies may take some time, but it’s not impossible using the right tactics (or the right team).

Check out a few ways to start optimizing your healthcare workflow here:

Work With an FCMO for Healthcare Workflow Optimization in Chicago

Healthcare fractional CMOs are the best people to help optimize your workflow. They can shoulder tedious marketing work by incorporating automation tools to reduce administrative burden.

These professionals also help you understand your patients. From creating great UX flow diagrams to help understand the patient’s journey to personalized treatment and care plans, FCMOs have the right skills to create marketing plans based on your customer persona and target audience. 

These professionals can also help your healthcare company come up with a marketing workflow analysis. With this information, an FCMO can help allocate resources (like budget and personnel) and remove inefficiencies.

Digitize Workflows

Switching from doing everyday operations manually to digitizing them on a computer is one of the best ways to start optimizing your workflow, especially in an industry as data-heavy as the healthcare industry.

Transitioning from traditional, paper-based processes to digital formats makes it easier to keep track of and manage information on patients and company operations.

Workflows can be digitized with the help of project management software, CRM software, or cloud storage tools, giving medical professionals quicker access to their files. These tools also offer easier communication and collaboration between your team.

Integrate Third-Party Apps and Tools

There’s a whole network of third-party apps and tools made to make your workflow shine. These tools can make a huge difference in managing healthcare processes as they are specialized to perform tasks quickly and efficiently.

For example, use communication tools to make exchanging of information faster and more seamless across medical teams and stakeholders. It is also ideal to use data-gathering tools to sort through and analyze big data and come up with personalized treatment plans.

Additionally, because healthcare professionals have a lot of tasks, projects, or assignments to go through, it would be ideal to incorporate project management tools for easier assigning, monitoring, and tracking progress.

You can even incorporate some of the best digital design workflow tools to improve your website and make the user experience better for patients. Don’t see the app you need? A Chicago mobile app development agency can make it.

Utilize Automation When Possible

With AI and automation taking shape in almost every industry, it’s no wonder that automation plays a big role in healthcare. These tools lessen the workload of medical professionals and streamline all efforts to improve the patient or customer experience.

Depending on what you do, businesses can automate a multitude of tasks. Healthcare clinics and hospitals might integrate AI in medical billing, record sharing (interoperability solutions), and appointment setting (the latter with appointment setting, in particular.

Medical manufacturing companies might talk to their Chicago healthcare FCMOs about AI-backed predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Data Analytics for Research and Development (R&D).

Healthcare software companies might think about AI to help their enterprise with user behavior analytics, natural language processing (NLP) for voice-activated questions or commands, and automated testing to speed up time-to-market. (DAP’s FCMO also works with the top Chicago custom software development agency for added insights as well.)

Review Budget Allocation

Budget allocation is key to workflow optimization. To achieve this, carefully assess your finances and see how much can be spent and on what.

In reviewing your Chicago healthcare company's budget, you might come across these three FCMO techniques (but there are dozens more):

• Budget Variance Analysis: Compare actual spending against the budget to look for inconsistencies and the reasons why.
• Historical Spending Trends: Analyze past budget data to get a full look at spending patterns and forecast future needs.
• ROI Analysis for Capital Projects: Calculate the return on investment and see if proposed capital expenditures (CapEx) make sense with the healthcare company's goals.

Analyze Current Processes

To completely optimize a workflow, take a step back and carefully look at what your current processes are. This is especially important in the healthcare industry, where there is little to no room for error.

Start by walking through your whole process from start to finish and gathering feedback from your team, customers, and stakeholders. This is where you can identify any bottlenecks or constraints and make the necessary changes.

Once you adjust your process to eliminate any bottlenecks, walk through the process again to see if your desired output is on the horizon.

Finding the Best FCMO for Healthcare Workflow Optimization in Chicago

Adjusting and refining workflows can be a challenge, especially if you have been doing these processes for a long time.

Still, it’s a major step to bringing even greater results than before. If you need help navigating through these changes, consult an FCMO for healthcare workflow optimization in Chicago.

Digital Authority Partners is the place to go for Chicago’s best fractional CMO services. Our professional team of marketers can help guide you throughout the entire optimization process.

Whether you need a fractional CMO for medical device companies, medical SEO, or healthcare marketing, we can provide you with the right fit for your business.

If you are interested in learning more, send us a message for a time to chat (and a free consultation) with our Chicago FCMO. 

Sources:

Total Quality Management | Monash Business School 

Exploring Six Sigma and Total Quality Management | UMass Amherst

8 Common Misconceptions About Business Process Improvement | University of South Florida

Big Data Defined: Examples and Benefits | Google Cloud

Chicago Business Bulletin | World Business Chicago