A Health System, Hospital, and Provider Management Solution for Exceptional Performance and Transformational Improvement
Whether you lead a large health system, a smaller community-essential hospital, or a physician group practice owning diagnostic and surgical sites, you are dealing with an array of unprecedented challenges including declining reimbursement, spiraling labor costs, rising cost of debt, mounting pressure to redesign care delivery models, and a rapid shift to ambulatory sites, among others. And while you grapple with these challenges, you are also responsible for maintaining quality, improving care access, elevating patient experience, and ensuring long-term financial stability. Pulled in all directions, you need a leadership system that gives you tools and a framework for achieving exceptional performance.
Kada Health Operating System
The Kada Health Operating System (KHOS) is a leadership philosophy and management system used to achieve improvement and sustain excellence in operations and financial performance. It can apply to any healthcare organization and leverages several well-established management principles and concepts.
Central to KHOS: The "A + B" Core of Provider Efficiency and Patient Flow
In KHOS, everyone in the organization prioritizes making the organization:
- Provider Efficiency (Be The Best Place for Doctors and Clinical Staff to Give Care): KHOS creates a relentless focus on workflow and system optimization to maximize physician and caregiver time with patients.
- Patient Flow (The Best Place to Receive Care): Minimize the time required for patients to access care and move through the care continuum. Create a culture reducing the time it takes for patients to receive care.
Creating a clear focus on these two priorities generates the “fuel” needed to invest in the organization and achieve higher levels of quality to patients at reduced cost.
Background and Impact of KHOS
KHOS evolved from the leadership principles and management systems used at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. Now part of Corewell Health, Beaumont achieved national recognition as a leader in care quality, patient safety and price efficiency.
Achievements:
- Care Excellence Reputation: Top 5% of all US hospitals as ranked by US News & World Report, with nine or more specialties consistently ranked among the nation’s best.
- Quality Safety: Consistently a top 10 performer for care quality and safety among the prestigious teaching hospital and academic medical center members of the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC).
- Care Efficiency & Affordability: Top 10% of all US hospitals for efficiency and and affordable prices as ranked by RAND.
KHOS has been implemented in hospitals and health systems to transform the organization’s performance. As examples, a community health system with a 20% operating loss achieved profitability within six months, and a major East Coast quaternary referral center eliminated a 35% diversion rate, resulting in a 10% increase in revenue. Today, Kada Health shares this operating system and toolkit with organizations striving to improve.
Implementing KHOS: The Seven Elements
- Engage frontline physician leaders as members of the Executive Team.
Doctors are both service suppliers and customers. Including multiple physician voices in the executive team enhances decision-making and implementation of key initiatives.
- Create clarity of goals and priorities using a balanced scorecard.
KHOS uses a balanced scorecard to guide work in the organization, creating alignment from the board of directors to frontline staff.
- Track performance trends for key metrics using control charts.
The scorecard includes an internal and external metric for each scorecard domain. Metrics are monitored using control charts that show performance trends and benchmark comparisons.
- Accelerate the pace of decision-making.
Focus executive meetings on making decisions, not distributing information on performance. The KHOS Executive Brief standardizes how decisions are framed, fostering efficient and timely decision-making.
- Ensure an “all-staff” focus on patient flow and provider efficiency. An intense, organization-wide focus on improving efficiency for providers and access for patients yields improvement across the balanced scorecard. It becomes the driving force of company culture.
- Engage all personnel in improvement.
Encourage all staff to contribute to ideas for improvement, leveraging their knowledge and insights.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement and empowerment that decentralizes decision-making to the front-line.
Distribute authority for making decisions and implementing change to local leaders and staff when initiatives are low cost, low risk, easy to do and easy to undo.
Impact & Next Steps
By implementing the Kada Health Operating System, healthcare organizations—from academic health systems to community hospitals to physician practices—can achieve exceptional performance.
To learn more about how the Kada Health Operating System can help your organization, please call 402-334-5219 or e-mail us at info@kadahealth.com.
