Health Assessment – Waiting for the Result is the Most Scary Part...

United Christian Nethersole Hospital Community Health Service has been offering affordable and high quality health assessment (body check) service to the public. However, the lead time between actual clinical assessment and debriefing of assessment report was far from satisfactory. At the time before High Impact was engaged, the performance was at 28 days on average, which is far longer than the industry’s average of about 14 days.

We assisted a cross-functional team of healthcare professionals to shorten the lead time by 50%. To do this, the team first walked-through and analysed the whole report preparation process (from the point when the client completed the clinical assessment to the point that the client attended the debriefing session).

Upon studying the process activities and performance, improvement opportunities were identified. These opportunities include reassignment of individual activity buffers, rescheduling of certain routines, and resource reallocation.

Results

The project team had successfully shortened the lead time to 14 days while keeping the quality of report intact. In addition, the team also realized that shortening of lead time needs not increase workload or pressure.

N.B. This case has been documented in the VCD of our Process Improvement Self-Learning Kit.