Chapter 9 Case Study
VVH Patient Services Department Welcome Packet
Vincent Valley Health (VVH) has undertaken a number of marketing and population health projects to attract new patients. As part of this work, its leader, Julie Hammond, has decided that it would be helpful for new patients to understand the breadth of VVH services and to provide a tangible acknowledgment of their appreciation for choosing VVH.
Therefore, the Patient Services department has developed a process to create a bag/packet for each new primary care patient in its system. The process includes five steps:
Station 1: Look up the new patient in the electronic record, generate name label.
Station 2: Grab VVH bag and insert folder.
Station 3: Take folder out and add in general VVH information.
Station 4 Look up patient’s age/sex and then proceed to shelf to grab the correct
healthcare wellness item, add item to gift bag.
Station 5: Add bow to top of bag – inspect to assure that all items are correctly
included.
Five employees in Patient Services met to create their first set of bags as an experiment. They collected processing data for the first 20 bags, and the data is included in this website as VVH Patient Packet Process Data.xls. Throughput data was also collected on every fifth bag. Quality data was also collected. The team noticed that their process was not very efficient and many members of the team spent too much time waiting.
Do a Six Sigma analysis on the current state process and make recommendations for improvement.
