Who Should Read This: Anyone who juggles multiple software packages to meet complex reporting, compliance, and operational needs.
Client: Executive leaders who work in collaboration with local, state, and federal agencies to deliver mental health services and support to clients and their families.
Our client is a well-established, mission-oriented, nonprofit. They have grown year over year to meet a significant need in their community. They partner with governmental bodies and hospitals to serve their clients. In recent years, their services have broadened. At the same time, they adopted new software, based on recommendations from a governing agency. Their partners assured them the new platform would support their operational needs. Unfortunately, the agency's well-intended assumptions fell far short of reality.
Upon implementation, employees saw gaps in what the software could do. The platform was rigid and could not support the majority of their needs. The organization became subsumed under the weight of administrative work and data collection. The gyrations required to meet their complex reporting and compliance obligations exhausted them. Keeping pace with serving clients while using the wrong software stressed them out. Leaders and staff created workarounds and parallel processes. They spent hours compiling and cross-checking data and key performance indicators (KPIs). They resorted to paper documents in a predominantly digital industry. They did all this while continuing to deliver essential services to thousands of families each year. Along the way, they lost existing revenue and expansion opportunities. Why? Because everyone's workload was burdensome, and they were working beyond their capacity.
This lack of suitable software was a unique and difficult problem. They could see no clear solution. They knew they needed a better way of managing all aspects of their work. They simply did not have the bandwidth to solve these problems on their own. For this reason, they selected Abundiant to analyze their situation and find a path forward. The client asked Abundiant to study how they could:
- streamline their operations
- reclaim revenue sources
- improve their patient and provider experiences
- report statistics to underwriters, and
- achieve compliance.
At the same time, they needed to delicately navigate their suite of partnerships and collaborative relationships.
Abundiant facilitated dozens of targeted working sessions with leaders and staff across the organization. These sessions helped everyone understand how their processes work and where they intersect. Abundiant documented the client’s process pain points, creating current-state process flows. These highlighted the process challenges burdening the organization. They showed where manual processes were wasting hours and how the software had created complexity. The biggest inefficiencies we found were (1) entering and verifying duplicate data across multiple systems, (2) scheduling appointments manually, and (3) generating and synthesizing reports from many data sources. Abundiant also met with the client's external partners to understand their needs.
Next, Abundiant created future-state workflows for each process area. Electronic healthcare record (EHR) software suited the processes well. Abundiant captured every data element used in each current process. Abundiant also organized the group’s current-state documentation, data, and reports into an indexed collection. (These collections will make a future software implementation more efficient.) Finally, Abundiant evaluated several potential EHR platforms and packages. Working with the client, our team scored each package according to the client’s needs and documented how work could improve.
With this information, the client’s leaders could make a powerful decision to improve their organization's future. They will soon serve more clients, help more families, and recapture revenue opportunities. And new ways of working are improving their staff's quality of life. Now those are lifelines that make a difference!
