Michael Lombard
Director of Operational Excellence
KaiNexus customer Michael Lombard shares some opportunities for improvement - large and small - that were addressed in his organization's 90 Day Blitz.
In this video, Michael says...
Recently, we've been doing this thing called a 90 Day Blitz. We had all of our leaders come up with what's the best idea that [they] can think of, or come up with as many ideas as [they] can think of, and log [them] in KaiNexus and let's work on [them].
I'm going to talk about two [opportunities for improvement].
The first one is a bigger one, and I think it has a lot of impact. The theory was that if we can reduce the amount of times we contaminate our blood cultures, we can make it much better for the patient, much better for our clinicians that are collecting and analyzing the blood, and at the same time, we can reduce cost tremendously. That was one that we saw entered into KaiNexus, implemented, resolved it, and now we're tracking the cost savings. All that's been streamlined and done in the cloud.
Then there's another one that isn't a much of a financial gain, but it's so interesting, because what started out as a small idea turned into something bigger along the way.
Here's what happened. I was having lunch in the cafeteria with a biomed technician, and he was lamenting the fact that he keeps getting a lot of phone calls that should go to IT - people asking him to fix their computers and stuff. [This was happening] because the clinicians up on the unit (the nurses) are trying to figure out, while taking care of a patient, who do they call when a piece of equipment malfunctions. So they're already frustrated, now they're having to deal with this phone tree decision. It's affecting both the nurse and the biomed technician.
So we said "What can we do about that?" We pulled out a phone, used the KaiNexus app to load in the idea, and later on we started reviewing it with the right people. We said "well maybe we can have a one stop shop that clinicians can call and get help with whatever equipment issues they have." We were a little worried about how we'd fund this, but it turns out we have a great volunteer program, and we can utilize the volunteers to help answer the phone.
The act of doing that actually uncovered another opportunity for improvement that we hadn't anticipated, which was that we had gray areas between IT and biomed. We weren't always sure about who was taking care of what piece of equipment.
So the initial idea was just "make my job a little easier," but that grew into something bigger and better along the way.
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