Cape Cod Child Development Reduced Provider Payment Process Rework By 20% With GLSS
Florida
Healthcare
Patient Care
350%
After using DMAIC to identify and eliminate waste in a process, Cape Cod Child Development reduced payment process rework from 25% to 5%.
Nancy Sorbo is a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and the Director of Enrollment and Family Child Development at Cape Cod Child Development, a non-profit organization dedicated to provide world-class child and family-focused programs that nurture each child’s full potential.
THE CHALLENGE
The cycle time for the payment process of their childcare providers was taking too long.
Nancy’s original intent was to learn more about the payment process, but with an average cycle time of almost ten days, she realized their system needed an update.
So she set out to improve it using DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control).
Once she had a clear goal, buy-in from her team, and the scope of her project in place, she was ready to continue to the next phase of her project.
Her goal? To reduce the amount of rework within the provider payment process from 25% to 5% in 6 months.
THE DISCOVERY
To begin measuring the performance, Nancy needed a full understanding of the complete payment process from start-to-finish. To do this, she performed a Process Walk and created a Swimlane Map.
This helped her to outline the process and understand where waste and rework lived.
Then, by utilizing a Fishbone Diagram, she suspected to be causing the most rework was
- the difficulty of reaching providers
- the incorrect data received from the providers
- and the number of people involved in the process
She found that the attendance sheet used by providers to record their hours was not formatting properly on providers’ devices. This left parts of the form empty that are necessary to continue the payment process—resulting in rework and time spent waiting for responses. Nancy was surprised by this discovery, and she realized, “that’s something fixable. That’s something we can improve.”
…that’s something fixable. That’s something we can improve.
THE IMPROVEMENTS
From there, she began to implement solutions, which included:
- Providing education to providers regarding proper formatting
- Reducing providers’ workload by creating a sole email to receive the attendance sheets instead of the three separate emails they were using before
- Eliminating unnecessary printing by using two monitors and auto-populating the vouchers they needed to send to the Finance Department
- Discontinuing the use of paper checks – which required the CEO’s signature – by signing up providers for electronic payments
- Stopped using pink paper for attendance forms, which was part of a forgotten visual management system from the previous team–once again saving time and money!
All of this led to the improvement in rework within the process from 25% to 5%!
Nancy’s team is thrilled with their reduced workload and the ease of the process, plus the CEO is also happy to have her time back since she is no longer being tracked down to sign checks!
When we asked Nancy was her biggest takeaways were, she said:
Communication… if you’re able to show your team or who is ever involved in the process how it will positively affect them… they’re more likely to [buy-in].
After the results they’ve achieved, we’re sure Nancy’s team is ready for her next big project: transportation!
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