Dear Friends and Colleagues,
2007 was a year of learning, innovation and success. Thanks to the dedication and commitment of the EMPATH Team and our early-adopter client hospitals, we continue to re-write the book on patient care delivery.
From the launch of new technology products and the advancement of others, to new members of our leadership team, to the successful completion of several large projects, EMPATH continues to grow and thrive.
Please read on for more about how we continue to transform patient care processes in our role as The Hospital Operations Company.
Happy New Year to you and yours,
Michael B. Hill, MD, FACEP
President & CEO
EMPATH Consulting
888.436.7284 ext. 5902
Cape Fear Valley Medical Center faced daunting access, service and throughput issues due to a booming population. Yet senior leaders saw through the adversity and envisioned a hospital with top-level customer service and faster throughput times, and without a capacity crisis.
A 400-bed tertiary care facility with one of the busiest emergency departments in the nation, CFVMC engaged EMPATH to help with its transformation. In the last 11 months, EMPATH partnered with CFVMC to create changes in operations affecting the work of more than 1500 staff members. This project also established a comprehensive operations dashboard system and deployed multiple real-time monitoring systems collectively known as EMPATH Technology Services.
As a result of this project so far, inpatient satisfaction increased from the 70th to 91st percentile, with the ED climbing to greater than the 85th percentile. For more results, see our project description.
Professor Michael Hammer delivered a clear message to his class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — "the old approaches don't work, so we need something else." Focusing on healthcare's efforts to improve the delivery of patient care, he described the power of process as a key factor to success. He defined the essence of process as "integrating work and overcoming the consequences of organizational fragmentation — inefficiency, misalignment, suboptimization, confusion."
EMPATH aligns itself with these key messages. We believe that the "design of work is the key determinant of its performance. Poorly designed work inevitably leads to problems." Every day in project work with clients across the country, we use a proven methodology that delivers predictable improvement in operations performance.
Dr. Hammer characterized EMPATH's methodology as a "repeatable set of techniques that addresses issues in a holistic way, with metrics tightly bound into methodology." He added that the results achieved by EMPATH's clients "clearly indicate the success of the methodology."
Our end-to-end work across hospital-wide patient care processes has helped our clients achieve that "something else" that Dr. Hammer says is needed in healthcare. We have the experience, methods and technology to create a true transformation in hospital operations.
Dr. Michael Hammer has changed forever how businesses do business. He is the originator of reengineering and the process enterprise, managerial innovations that have now become part of standard business practice. Hammer and Company offers cutting-edge management education and research, concentrating on operations, organization, and technology utilization.
Visit www.hammerandco.com
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1160 Brickyard Cove Road, Ste. 110 Point Richmond, CA 94801 (510) 215-6220web: www.empath.md
email: info@empath.md