Middlesex Hospital

How KaiNexus Helps Connect a Dispersed Workforce in Daily Work

Brian Taber  |  Rehab Department Manager

In this video, Bryan says:

We've been using KaiNexus at Middlesex Hospital for about a year. I work in the Rehab Department - I'm the manager. Middlesex is a small community hospital, but we cover a vast service area, so for our particular Rehab, we actually have five different locations. We're struggling with having process improvements that, even within our own location, we've been working independently on when we could have been working together on them as a team.

We've been on a journey through Lean here at our hospital for the last couple of years, and we've rolled out the use of the kaizen boards in many of our different our locations. We found that this was limited because they were only visible to that location. We were looking for a way to spread this out over a vast range of employees and different departments. As Mark and Greg mentioned, we started with the shared drive and tried to do things there, but we were hitting some barriers. We had Mark come to the hospital to help us with our kaizen boards and that's when we first learned about KaiNexus, and we've been using it for about a year now. The Rehab Department has been the pilot, and we're in the process of rolling it out to many other departments across the hospital so we can work more collaboratively. I'd love to share my screen to show what we've been working on. 

This is just a quick overview of our dashboard that we're working on [in KaiNexus]. We have five different locations, and we've decided to break it up so that each location in our stand-up huddles has the ability to report out on the improvement project they're working on or items they've seen that they feel need attention. So every morning we as a group meet for fifteen minutes where we just go through our outstanding items where we're hung up, and we go from there. We started by logging small little items such as "We need to change the way we're distributing forms for patients," and we're starting to experiment more on using projects to track bigger events across the department.

One of the examples is that we just had a really big redesign of the whole front end of our department. We needed a way to keep ourselves on task in what we needed to be doing to progress this, and also to look back and say "What was our final benefit from this." What I'm showing here is an example of one of the projects that we're working on, and how it's broken up into the smaller opportunities for improvement. So for instance, this is our overall redesign, and one of the pieces that we looked at was "We need a way to track our authorizations and getting our notes signed back from physicians," so we're including that note to include that tracking sheet here in one of our OIs.

Jumping to another one, we have a scheduling system that we use that's electronic, but it doesn't alert us when things are due. So how can we build some pieces in that will help with those alerts? This is one of the pieces that we're working on. This is one that has many tasks that came about because of this OI that will overall hopefully improve the process that we're using for scheduling.

That's in a nutshell how we've been using the software. It certainly has been great in that it keeps our five departments on track with where we're going, and we're excited to start rolling this out to other departments within the hospital so we can get that cross-departmental improvement. What we've been finding is that without rolling it across, we send something out to someone and then we have to do the back and forth via email and get it back into the system, so rolling it out to more departments should be a great step to go forward from here.