Read this if you are a director or manager at a Health and Human Services agency in charge of modernizing your state's Health and Human Services systems.
When states start to look at outdated Health and Human Services systems like Eligibility Systems or Medicaid Enterprise Systems, they spend a lot of time on strategic planning efforts and addressing technology deficiencies that set the direction for their agencies. While they pay a lot of attention to the technology aspects of the work, they often overlook others. Here are three to pay attention to:
- Business process improvement
- Organization development
- Organizational change management
Including these important steps in strategic planning often improves the likelihood of an implementation of Health and Human Service systems that provide the fully intended value or benefit to the citizen they help serve. When planning major system improvements, agencies need to have the courage to ask other critical questions that, when answered, will help guarantee greater success upon implementation of modernized system.
Don’t forget, it’s not only about new technology—it’s about gaining efficiencies in your business processes, structuring your organization in a manner that supports business process improvements, and helping the people in your organization and external stakeholders accept change.
Business process improvement
When thinking about improving business processes, a major consideration is to identify what processes can be improved to save time and money, and deliver services to those in need faster. When organizations experience inefficiencies in their business processes, more often than not the underlying processes and systems are at fault, not the people. Determining which processes require improvement can be challenging. However, analyzing your business processes is a key factor in strategic planning, understanding the challenges in existing processes and their underlying causes, and developing solutions to eliminate or mitigate those causes are essential to business process improvement.
Once you pinpoint areas of process improvement, you can move forward with reviewing your organization, classifying needs for potential organization development, and begin developing requirements for the change your organization needs.
Organization development
An ideal organizational structure fully aligns with the mission, vision, values, goals, and strategy of an organization. One question to ask when considering the need for organization development is, “What does your organization need to look like to support your state’s to-be vision?” Answering this question can provide a roadmap that helps you achieve:
- Improved outcomes for vulnerable populations, such as those receiving Medicaid, TANF, SNAP, or other Health and Human Services benefits
- Positive impacts on social determinants of health in the state
- Significant cost savings through a more leveraged workforce and consolidated offices with related fixed expenses—and turning focus to organizational change management
Organization development does not stop at reviewing an organization’s structure. It should include reviewing job design, cultural changes, training systems, team design, and human resource systems. Organizational change is inherent in organization development, which involves integration of a change management strategy. When working through organization development, consideration of the need for organizational change should be included in both resource development and as part of the cultural shift.
Organizational change management
Diverging from the norm can be an intimidating prospect for many people. Within your organization, you likely have diverse team members who have different perspectives about change. Some team members will be willing to accept change easily, some will see the positive outcomes from change, but have reservations about learning a new way of approaching their jobs, and there will be others who are completely resistant to change.
Successful organizational change management happens by allowing team members to understand why the organization needs to change. Leaders can help staff gain this understanding by explaining the urgency for change that might include:
- Aging technology: Outdated systems sometimes have difficulty transmitting data or completing simple automated tasks.
- Outdated processes: “Because we’ve always done it this way” is a red flag, and a good reason to examine processes and possibly help alleviate stressors created by day-to-day tasks. It might also allow your organization to take care of some vital projects that had been neglected because before there wasn’t time to address them as a result of outdated processes taking longer than necessary.
- Barriers to efficiency: Duplicative processes caused by lack of communication between departments within the organization, refusal to change, or lack of training can all lead to less efficiency.
To help remove stakeholder resistance to change and increase excitement (and adoption) around new initiatives, you must make constant communication and training an integral component of your strategic plan.
Investing in business process improvement, organization development, and organizational change management will help your state obtain the intended value and benefits from technology investments and most importantly, better serve citizens in need.
Does your organization have interest in learning more about how to help obtain the fully intended value and benefits from your technology investments? Contact our Health and Human Services consulting team to talk about how you can incorporate business process improvement, organization development, and organizational change management activities into your strategic planning efforts.