Healthcare Value Analysis Academy What Top Skills Are Required to Make You Successful in Healthcare Value Analysis? By Robert W. Yokl, Sr. VP, Operations— SVAH Solutions
For most healthcare supply chain organizations, value analysis has become mission critical to the success of savings and quality improvement goals. The concept of value analysis appears simple and straightforward with lofty savings goals attached to it by most organizations. To accomplish these new goals for your organization you need new and advanced skills, systems, processes, and hard work to achieve great things in the job of value analysis. I thought it would be time to start writing about what you need to have in your tool/skill sets that will make you successful in the short and long-term. •
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VA Project Management – The value analysis world is filled with multitudes of VA studies, initiatives, and conversions. You must be ready to handle all the product, service, technology and process studies on an ongoing basis. You are the quarterback and you need to move all these projects through to completion with positive results in all cases if possible. The only way to manage this is to use specific value analysis project management along with a strong study process to make this happen. Embrace Advanced Analytics – It is a given that you must be an expert with a spreadsheet but that is only a small part of the reporting and analysis picture. You must start to embrace the world of relational databases that are the backbone of all advanced analytics platforms and reporting tools. Once you understand and use the database tools you will learn how you can make your best analysis automatic and repeatable with less work and better results every time. Maintain a Solid Value Analysis Process – We are not talking about the process where a new product request is filled out, then sent to the VA Coordinator and then the VA Committee; that is more of workflow. What we are talking about is the value analysis approach that is used for studies based on functional analysis. This is the process that will streamline and guide all your studies and help you get a better understanding of any and all products, services, technologies and processes without being a subject matter expert. Master Benchmarking – Most people do not like being compared to anyone else and told that they could do better in this area or that, but there is no better tool or skill set that will let you know exactly where you stand or where you should be. That skill is benchmarking or the search for the best practice with apples to apples comparisons in functional characteristics. Remember, there are so many different types of benchmarks that you can benefit from - historical, cohort, system-wide, pricing, utilization, etc. Volume 7/Issue 1
Healthcare Value Analysis & Utilization Management Magazine
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