Helping hospitals and healthcare providers transform their performance and improve patient-experience and health outcomes
Innovations in healthcare delivery and provider organisations are helping hospitals deliver better care. However, economics in the healthcare sector remain challenging. In an environment where it is imperative to strengthen clinical quality, increase delivery of personalized care, and improve the patient experience—while also enhancing management efficacy and productivity—we help healthcare executives redefine their strategies, identify and capture opportunities, eliminate waste and variability, optimize resources and leverage data and best practices.
We help providers navigate this complex landscape by introducing innovations in care delivery and management along every step of the journey, from understanding opportunities for improvement to implementing changes. We have led projects addressing a broad range of issues and draw upon our international experience for best practices and key insights.
We support healthcare providers take the following actions:
- think through key trends in their complex environment to inform their approach to innovation, digital health, advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence, including increasing the use of automation and harnessing healthcare data to introduce new business models
- adopt best in class processes to improve quality, reduce cost, and optimize productivity
- focus on the fundamental redesign of frontline clinical care to provide for sustainable change over the long term
- use bottom-up planning to ensure that clinicians and managers own initiatives and that initiatives are concrete and actionable—they move through a structured stage-gate process, from ideation to realization
- improve the patient and employee experience—for example, by involving patients more closely in care delivery
- address the mind-sets and cultures of clinical and nonclinical staff to increase an organization’s agility and achieve lasting results
Featured capabilities
We invest heavily in developing proprietary tools, databases, and methods.
Analytics assets and Nebula platform: We regularly develop analytical tools to support our clients, such as our hospital diagnostic and benchmarking dashboard, which benchmarks providers across the full spectrum of hospital-performance key performance indicators, our urgent- and emergency-care demand and capacity dashboard to optimize demand and capacity across provider sites, or our theater-utilization dashboard which measures and sizes the opportunities from their optimization.
Our proprietary cloud-based data platform allows us to analyze massive and sensitive healthcare data sets securely. It provides a scalable infrastructure, isolated data lakes for each provider, and HITRUST and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 certifications.
Organizational Health Index: Our rigorous, quantitative diagnostic assesses the performance and health of organisations across all areas of a hospital, considering all the dimensions and practices that make for a strong and durable organisation . Combined with insights from our extensive experience across geographies it allows to understand the gaps to becoming best in class and what to do about it.
Wave: Our cloud-based program-management platform enables providers to plan, track, report, and act in order to deliver the full impact of complex transformations. It offers impact tracking, full transparency, and automated reporting. We adjust Wave to fit the specific needs and terminology of healthcare providers.
Examples of our work
Working with EU institutions to re-define the impact of AI on healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations
We recently worked with EIT Health, the EU’s assigned agency for innovation and technology in Healthcare, to adapt the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) analyses on the Future of Work in the era of automation and help redefine the of impact of AI on healthcare professionals in Europe and the potential actions for healthcare organisations and health systems.
Holistic transformation and performance improvement
One country’s largest hospital group was struggling with near bankruptcy and looking to improve its financial performance dramatically. We helped design a comprehensive transformation that enabled it to improve and modernize its care delivery drastically. As a result, the organization transformed and modernized care delivery organisations and moved from a deficit of approximately €90 million to positive income within three years (and eventually achieved a yearly impact of more €130 million), with sustained economic performance ever since.
Digital strategy and transformation
We assisted a large hospital group in developing a clear strategy that focused on digital transformation across hospitals to address poor patient attraction and retention through digital channels, lack of centralized patient data, inefficiencies in clinical processes because of paper-based workflows, and lack of IT-infrastructure integration. The project resulted in identification of some €200 million in return on investment for the organization annually, a 5 to 6 percent increase in patient customer-satisfaction score a 12 to 14 percent increase in operating- and emergency-room utilization, a reduction in waiting times and absences, and the introduction of telehealth. Additionally, it yielded quick wins worth more than €10 million in net savings within a year, which helped cross-finance other areas of development.
Improving healthcare productivity
A leading academic hospital across multiple sites had a significant underlying deficit and had identified £60 million in saving ideas. However, management was only confident of delivering 75 percent of that figure. We helped the hospital with a two-stage process: a diagnostics phase, looking at a wide range of areas for improvement, followed by an intensive support program. The process enabled the hospital to achieve £80 million of in-year savings by the end of the year.
Innovative solutions for region-specific diseases
Working across a region with the 6 most underperforming hospitals with regards to emergency care, we developed and implemented plans to optimize non-elective patient pathways from arrival to the emergency department all the way through optimizing complex discharges from the hospital. This included optimizing processes in the emergency department, changes ward management, rethinking discharges and implementing new ways to manage patients flows in the hospital. Breaches of the emergency care performance target where reduced by up to 80% within less than 6 months.
Turnaround and recovery
A leading, public acute-care hospital was experiencing large budget deficits and a weak outlook, based on structural-cost increases. We helped it undertake a comprehensive turnaround, with initial diagnostics and design of a transformation program to recover the losses and reposition the hospital for long-term sustainability. The first phase resulted in a change program that included ten different streams targeting short- and long-term savings of around 15 percent across the hospital’s cost base within four years, with savings currently in capture. We also helped establish a client-led project-management office for the program and provided for capability building.
Featured experts
Chris Llewellyn
Senior PartnerLondon
Co-leads our work globally in the life sciences, biopharma, medical products and health technology spaces