CS Odessa ConceptDraw Products Used to Apply Lean Six Sigma Principles in Healthcare
ConceptDraw Office is a powerful tool to design and build new business processes because of the integration of the individual ConceptDraw products to plan each process segment
Odessa, Ukraine, March 02, 2011 — CS Odessa today announced that its popular ConceptDraw Office suite was used to facilitate a Six Sigma approach in the creation of a new business process for a group of hospitals in Texas. Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Southlake, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, recently completed a project to re-organize its health insurance validation process. Consultant Ralph Jarvis and his team used ConceptDraw brainstorming and the project management capabilities to create a new process that will be rolled out to 11 affiliated hospitals across Texas.
“The goal was to improve the patient experience by reducing wait times,” Jarvis says. “By reusing information, the hospital could ensure that its patients wouldn’t have to fill out insurance forms each time they moved within and between hospitals in the consortium,” Jarvis says. “ConceptDraw was a great communication and management tool. But what made it really stand out was that it also made it easy for us to demonstrate to hospital execs how our Lean Six Sigma approach was producing results.”
Jarvis says the project was actually made up of three smaller projects. The Six Sigma Black Belt project team used ConceptDraw MINDMAP to manage the brainstorming sessions for each focus area.
Jarvis explains, “First we used [ConceptDraw] MINDMAP’s brainstorming capabilities to create a visual representation of our thinking. What kinds of things did patients do while they were in the hospital? How much time was spent in any one step of care? How much time did it take to go to the next step, such as getting a CT scan, an MRI, or blood test? What could the hospital do when patients first entered the hospital that would ease patients’ stress and give them a positive experience?”
To facilitate the next step in the process, Jarvis’s team moved from ConceptDraw MINDMAP to ConceptDraw PROJECT and created a project management plan.
“The two programs share a common technique of storing data, so we could instantly view all of the brainstorming details inside a standard project plan,” Jarvis says. “That enabled us to jump right into establishing project timing, coordination among the various departments, and milestones and guidelines.”
Jarvis says the ConceptDraw Office suite is appropriate for Lean Six Sigma because his team could use ConceptDraw MINDMAP to pursue three integrated processes and then put them together into one project. Then the team could use ConceptDraw PROJECT to create a timeline and complete a specific Lean Six Sigma model for successful implementation of the healthcare project.
About CS Odessa
Founded in 1993, Computer Systems Odessa supplies cross-platform productivity tools and graphics technologies to professional and corporate users around the world. With headquarters in Odessa, Ukraine, and an office in San Jose, Calif., USA, CS Odessa sells products internationally through resellers in over 25 countries. The ConceptDraw line of products has won numerous awards and is used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.
For more information, visit www.conceptdraw.com.
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CS Odessa
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