Organization Quickly Identifies and Quantifies Sources of Clinical Variation
Difficult to Identify and Manage Clinical Variation
Because clinical variation can be difficult to regularly identify and manage, many healthcare organizations rely on outsourced consultants to identify cost savings initiatives. However, this can incur significant added cost. Additionally, when the consulting projects end, hospital leaders are left without the internal governance, analytics tools, or standard processes to continue identifying variation on their own.
After their last consulting engagement, the continuous improvement team at one small, multi-site health system experienced exactly that. Without their external consultants, this organization did not have a unified process to identify, track, and aggregate the impact of cost-reduction initiatives. They lacked both the right resources and technology to continuously identify clinical variation opportunities and did not feel confident to take their data to physician leadership to suggest changes.