How Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Automated Improvement Tracking

April 4, 2019

When the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) kicked off their internal Financial Stewardship program, they began to see a big culture shift. Led by a coordinated team of financial, clinical and supply chain leaders, the internal program was created to drive multiple goals, including increasing revenue, shifting their culture, and driving improvement projects.

This Financial Stewardship team worked to empower the organization with financial, advisory and analytic services that would deliver data needed to support their overall mission. With its implementation, an already strong internal governance structure became even stronger, and this culture of improvement was pushing increased cost reduction, improved efficiency, and revenue for future investments. CHOP’s Financial Stewardship program is even helping the organization work toward their improvement goal of $120 million in the next three years.

But within the first year, they realized a critical roadblock.

They had established an incredible network of workstreams, a structured approval process with validation and steering committees, and a cross-functional culture of improvement.

But CHOP also discovered that their project tracking was manual, decentralized, and labor-intensive. And this was making their maintenance of ongoing projects more difficult than it needed to be.

CHOP needed a way to track and maintain almost 200 ongoing initiatives to drive that mission. And to do that, they needed to make their tracking system-based, standardized, systematic, and streamlined, instead.

Using the Continuous Improvement (CI) tool, CHOP developed a system to track all active projects and both draft and review upcoming initiatives. Implementing CI allowed CHOP to draft and review 204 initiatives, finalizing 71 initiatives, and committing to future savings.

Financial stewardship helps CHOP maintain their organizational mission. Founded in 1855 as the nation’s first hospital dedicated exclusively to pediatrics, Children’s Healthcare of Philadelphia (CHOP) is among the largest pediatric research facilities in the world. The organization is considered renowned for its medical advancements—including their invention of the first artificial womb in 2017. Education and research are essential parts of CHOP’s mission as an organization— investments the organization is dedicated to protecting.

Savings allow CHOP to drive impact, with increased investment in innovative pediatric research, in additional clinical capacity, and in their people and facilities. With this savings tracking system, CHOP can continue to invest in cutting-edge research, state-of-the-art technology, and in their community.