Dr. Kenagy has made Adaptive Design his life’s work because it’s the most effective way to create a healthcare system that works for everyone. Adaptive Design will enable your organization to:
- challenge everyone to improve as part of everyday work
- create flexibility and responsiveness
- change the culture through results and personal success
- replicate success, creating predictability, structure, and discipline
- increase patient care time by decreasing meeting time.
How Adaptive Design Works
Modeling innovative methods of forward-looking companies, Adaptive Design empowers management to create solutions to problems as they happen on the front line. These small changes lead to progressively better care at lower cost.
When a patient doesn’t get what he or she needs, the system calls for improvement right there, on the spot, in real time. It’s every person’s job, every day. Adaptive Design employs structured, test-and-validate methods to identify the problem and find the solution, guided by management as close to the patient as possible. Here’s how:
- When a patient doesn’t get what he or she needs, those close to the problem alert the unit’s Adaptive Design team.
- The team uses the structure and discipline of Adaptive Design to clarify the problem.
- With the problem clarified, the team uses just the resources needed to find solutions.
- Team members then test and refine solutions until the patient receives exactly what he or she needs.
- The focus of Adaptive Design links information to action and then to verifiable results using only the resources needed and as close to the patient and problem as possible.
Benefits of Adaptive Design
Staff development
Adaptive Design fosters high job satisfaction across the spectrum of healthcare workers — from parking attendants, to physicians, to managers, and everywhere in between. Because the method is simple, clear, and consistent, Adaptive Design enables frontline workers to find solutions to long-term problems. It accentuates the skills and knowledge they already possess and provides immediate value, inspiring them toward mastery of new skills. By generating results, Adaptive Design helps develop everyone’s trust, optimism, high performance, and innovation. Organizations trained in the Adaptive Design process have seen:
- most improved patient satisfaction in an 18-hospital system
- highest staff engagement scores in a 12-hospital system
- staff turnover decrease of 51% in 1 year.
Fiscal health
With Adaptive Design, there are no trade-offs between cost and quality. By conserving resources, eliminating waste, and developing efficiency, Adaptive Design restores fiscal health. Groups employing Adaptive Design saw these measurable benefits:
- Colorado Chest Pain Center generated $700,000 in savings, $175,000 directly to the bottom line in 6 months.
- Minnesota Medical-Surgical Unit met all IOM safety recommendations in 6 months with no task forces, committee meetings, quality improvement projects, or new technology.
- Colorado hospital pharmacy lowered volume-adjusted drug costs (VADC) by 2.3% while the other hospital system pharmacies’ VADC rose 11%. This improvement translated to $1.9 million in savings — directly to the bottom line.
- Massachusetts hospital OR saved $625,000 directly to the bottom line in improved charge capture and supply chain management in 6 months while they simultaneously increased volume by 16% and decreased overtime by 14%.
- Indiana materials management team increased their productivity by 233% while simultaneously almost eliminating stock-outs and decreasing inventory by 21%.
- In 2002, an independent financial consulting group estimated 5-year Adaptive Design savings for a community hospital to be $45,000,000.
- Wyoming community hospital found solving 52 problems in the course of work generated more than $200,000 in savings.
