Healthcare costs are spiraling. As a result, many corporations have moved to a self-funded insurance model. The plans are administered by a large insurance provider, but the corporations absorb the risk of loss for their employee group.
This approach serves the corporation and its employees well as it provides excellent services while minimizing the cost of care.
Companies have found that chronic disease patients consume 75% of healthcare costs. These include medical issues such as diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, COPD, and obesity.. There are solutions on the horizon that will provide healthcare organizations early warning alerts if an employee with a chronic disease is about to suffer a catastrophic event. Such a solution would improve the quality of care and even save lives while decreasing the cost of care.
Many corporations and insurance companies have wellness programs. Typically they are dietary focused, exercise driven, enabled with health coaches, and provide basic monitoring devices such as scales, glucose testers and pedometers. These programs are tremendous and valuable.
The next step is to provide remote monitoring for the at-risk employees. The benefits of remote monitoring are multi-fold. If there is an early warning delivered to alert medical staff as a catastrophic event is impending, a disaster could be averted. An example is: John Smith was showing indications of a heart attack with alerts that his heart rate and blood pressure were exceeding thresholds, If Mr. Smith can get admitted to the hospital prior to the onset of a heart attack, his treatment will have cost the self-insured corporation 10 times less. Plus John is now healthier with minimal loss of work due to recovery time.
Another benefit of an early warning alert and monitoring solution is that it enables the medical practitioner to review past readings when employee patient is in for an office visit. If the patient has a complaint related to a recent event, the doctor can review the readings to provide better treatment. In this case, better information equals better care.
Early warning monitoring solutions are now a viable solution. There have been major advances in remote monitoring devices and technology, along with extensive wireless and wired networks that capture the data, the health information vaults to store the data, and the security infrastructure to maintain HIPAA compliance.
RSI is equipped to help organizations provide better healthcare solutions while reducing costs. We have years of industry expertise, strong relationships among device manufacturers, network providers, health information exchanges and security experts. RSI can help you provide better healthcare, reduce your healthcare expense, increase employee satisfaction, and increase productivity. By the way, the ROI in the program is another benefit to your bottom line.
Please visit us at www.realistic-solutions.com
Sunday, December 5, 2010
How will the next generation product roadmap help you in 2011?
This article can easily be titled “Building best practices for your next generation product roadmap." The next generation refers to ensuring the development team and the requirements team (generally marketing) are in sync regarding market dynamics and cohesive communications.
Why do things get out of sync?
Many times the requirements documentation is too rigid, inadequate, or incomplete. This causes initial heartburn for the development team and heart attacks for marketing and sales upon delivery. Both can be avoided. Every person within the chain (including your customers) wants a solution that meets their needs and is current upon release. Impossible you say? Maybe, but with proper planning and activities, the outcome can be improved.
Getting a product out the door
Of course, there has to be a release schedule. There has to be a cut-off date for changes prior to a go live date. The key is to not have any surprises regarding what you think you are going to deliver and what is delivered. Work arounds - yes; surprises - no. Organizations that do this well have instilled a disciplined process for moving a product from need to delivery in a streamlined way that delivers what was promised.
We work with many organization’s marketing teams or customer service/fulfillment groups and help them find the best process for managing the development process every step of the way. The major steps include:
• Build a best practice criteria worksheet – key factors include customer needs, time to market, innovation factors, implementation costs, and the impact on your long range plan.
• Implement a "Scope Dashboard" to track changes to the original requirements and manage the release schedule.
• Ensure that product manager understands the requirements well enough to communicate the needs and expected outcomes,by customer segment, to the development team. It’s important to remain open and helpful, not defensive. Developers have great ideas as well.
• It is a must to build beta test cycles into the service delivery schedule. Being late is better than being apologetic for a release.
Development absorbs corporate funds. Funds have a priority assigned to them. Thus, the business case for each development project should prioritize requirements, have a ROI for each segment; defined channel strategies to measure performance, and, to the extent possible, have a product specific P&L on both an allocated and incremental cost basis.
The RSI team's experience encompasses many years of development efforts. We have helped many organizations streamline a sometimes painful process. Call us with your challenges. Visit our website at www.realistic-solutions.com We look forward to working with you.
Why do things get out of sync?
Many times the requirements documentation is too rigid, inadequate, or incomplete. This causes initial heartburn for the development team and heart attacks for marketing and sales upon delivery. Both can be avoided. Every person within the chain (including your customers) wants a solution that meets their needs and is current upon release. Impossible you say? Maybe, but with proper planning and activities, the outcome can be improved.
Getting a product out the door
Of course, there has to be a release schedule. There has to be a cut-off date for changes prior to a go live date. The key is to not have any surprises regarding what you think you are going to deliver and what is delivered. Work arounds - yes; surprises - no. Organizations that do this well have instilled a disciplined process for moving a product from need to delivery in a streamlined way that delivers what was promised.
We work with many organization’s marketing teams or customer service/fulfillment groups and help them find the best process for managing the development process every step of the way. The major steps include:
• Build a best practice criteria worksheet – key factors include customer needs, time to market, innovation factors, implementation costs, and the impact on your long range plan.
• Implement a "Scope Dashboard" to track changes to the original requirements and manage the release schedule.
• Ensure that product manager understands the requirements well enough to communicate the needs and expected outcomes,by customer segment, to the development team. It’s important to remain open and helpful, not defensive. Developers have great ideas as well.
• It is a must to build beta test cycles into the service delivery schedule. Being late is better than being apologetic for a release.
Development absorbs corporate funds. Funds have a priority assigned to them. Thus, the business case for each development project should prioritize requirements, have a ROI for each segment; defined channel strategies to measure performance, and, to the extent possible, have a product specific P&L on both an allocated and incremental cost basis.
The RSI team's experience encompasses many years of development efforts. We have helped many organizations streamline a sometimes painful process. Call us with your challenges. Visit our website at www.realistic-solutions.com We look forward to working with you.
Contact Center Optimization
As contact centers receive increased pressure to perform activities more efficiently, organizations must scrutinize their technologies and processes to uncover new ways to improve. Organizations that are successful in creating contact center operationally efficiencies and cost savings are skilled at looking at their center with a fresh approach.
Clearly understanding your business drivers is the first step for management to improve efficiencies within the contact center. Otherwise your achievements will not be aligned with corporate goals.
These drivers are the basis that we focus on to deliver efficiencies and cost savings to your firm. We leverage our unique Activity Based Modeling and Costing tool. It provides a detailed financial and operational "current state" as the foundation to measure the impact of proposed changes.
Our initial efforts highlight cost reduction opportunities, provide a process and infrastructure review, and provides a baseline for establishing "best practices".
During the analysis process, many what-if scenarios and alternatives are scrutinized. These detail the operational savings and capital costs of any proposed change, measuring the ROI. Our model forecasts the impact of changes for a three-year, "future state" financial view.
The inputs always tie into your business drivers. We also include details regarding direct and indirect cost items, as well as our gained knowledge regarding process and technology alternatives. The output illustrates the high activity, high cost items that impact your business drivers.
Results illustrate improved business analysis and targeted contact center changes. These changes can be implemented to deliver immediate productivity gains of at least 20% to 30% in focused areas. Longer term changes can produce similar results.
Clearly understanding your business drivers is the first step for management to improve efficiencies within the contact center. Otherwise your achievements will not be aligned with corporate goals.
These drivers are the basis that we focus on to deliver efficiencies and cost savings to your firm. We leverage our unique Activity Based Modeling and Costing tool. It provides a detailed financial and operational "current state" as the foundation to measure the impact of proposed changes.
Our initial efforts highlight cost reduction opportunities, provide a process and infrastructure review, and provides a baseline for establishing "best practices".
During the analysis process, many what-if scenarios and alternatives are scrutinized. These detail the operational savings and capital costs of any proposed change, measuring the ROI. Our model forecasts the impact of changes for a three-year, "future state" financial view.
The inputs always tie into your business drivers. We also include details regarding direct and indirect cost items, as well as our gained knowledge regarding process and technology alternatives. The output illustrates the high activity, high cost items that impact your business drivers.
Results illustrate improved business analysis and targeted contact center changes. These changes can be implemented to deliver immediate productivity gains of at least 20% to 30% in focused areas. Longer term changes can produce similar results.
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