Healthcare



Our focus is to help health centers improve their patient-centered medical care.  A truly effective patient centered medical home requires efficient clinical operations. We accomplish this by creating flow and through the customized and specially tailored application of proven waste reduction methods. This ultimately leads to the elimination of bottlenecks and increased patient throughput.  Leveraging Lean principles, we focus on the following areas:


  • PCMH Transformation
  • Clinical operations efficiency
  • Patient cycle time reduction - see Julie Cho's article here
  • Patient access - see Julie Cho's article here
  • No-Show analysis and strategy
  • Efficient scheduling policy for maximum patient volume and efficient clinical flow
  • Clinic utilization
  • Staff labor utilization
  • Provider productivity
  • Streamlining medical staff responsibilities and training
  • Efficient registration process
  • Patient satisfaction
  • Revenue cycle management - see Julie Cho's article here
  • Efficient registration process



SERVICES PROVIDED

PCMH Transformation







We work with health centers to achieve their highest level of NCQA PCMH recognition. Julie Cho is an  PCMH certified content expert and possesses the necessary expertise. At Locke Consulting Group, we help health centers go beyond just meeting the recognition requirements. Many of the elements for PCMH recognition require more than just policy institution to be effective.  Streamlining clinical operations is a necessary step for PCMH transformation to be successful beyond NCQA recognition. PCMH transformation in a clinic with properly streamlined operations will achieve not only care coordination and population health management, but also patient cycle time reduction, increased patient access and improved patient throughput. We work with health centers to appropriately streamline their clinical operations while implementing NCQA’s PCMH guidelines.

Patient Cycle Time Reduction


Patient cycle time is the time from when a patient walks into the clinic to the time that the patient leaves the clinic. While EMR captures the total patient cycle time from the time patient checks in, it cannot capture the time the patient waits before checking in. Furthermore, clinics get behind if patient scheduling is not appropriately designed or carried out (e.g. scheduling a new patient into a return patient slot). Therefore, patient cycle time starts when the patient schedules an appointment. At Locke Consulting Group, we take a detailed look into every step that plays into patient cycle time, and help health centers streamline operations for each of these steps. We identify root causes for bottlenecks, eliminate any non-value add waste, and create a flow. This achieves true operational efficiency, resulting in patient cycle time reduction.