Eliminated Client Waitlist for Pregnant Women in Need

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Roxanne Zuck, Program Supervisor, from Monarch Recovery Services, identified that the Pregnancy Parenting Outreach Program (PPOP) assessment process was taking a long time. Roxanne decided to take action in order to reduce the time it took to perform the assessment. By using Lean Green Belt tools, an informed problem statement was developed and a scope of work was identified. The background information and current conditions were then analyzed in order to create clear goals. This led her to successfully overcome this challenge, saving time for all stakeholders and eliminating waitlists for clients.

LAUNCH AND EXPLORE

Background information was gathered and the Current state conditions were defined in order to determine an informed problem statement and scope of work. Upon exploring the current state, some conditions were found, including the following: The Assessment Coordinator only conducted assessments for Women’s Treatment and for the Women’s Aftercare, and Case Managers for the PPOP were taking referrals for individuals who may or may not be appropriate for their program. Furthermore, the form had many questions on it that were not relevant to PPOP and took a significant amount of time to complete as the clients often felt like they could elaborate more with the case manager. Often times the case manager would then refer the client to treatment where they did the assessment over again with the assessment coordinator.

Considering this background information, the problem statement was then clearly defined as: The intake process for different programs varied and caused delays in services.

ANALYSIS

A Root Causes Analysis was conducted and specific action items were identified. It was determined that one of the main issues was that the assessment form was 6 pages long and therefore caused the case manager to have an overloaded schedule. When conducting the root cause analysis, it was determined that the questionnaire used for PPOP assessments had been formulated by copying the treatment plus assessment form questions relevant to PPOP clients. This resulted in some of the questions on the form being irrelevant to the assessment process, as the treatment specific information included on the form was not required to open a file for a PPOP client. Once the root cause of the problem was determined it became clear what the Goal of the project was.

GOALS

4 Goals were outlined in order to address the challenge specified in the problem statement. The goals were defined as follows: (1) to have all the assessments done by the assessment office, (2) to reduce the wait time for services, (3) to make the assessment forms more user friendly/shorter, (4) and to make access to services better for clients.

RESULTS

The first 2 goals, to have all the assessments done by the assessment office and to reduce the wait time for services were addressed by training the Assessment Coordinator in asking personal questions in a way that solicits honest and straight forward answers. It was found that it aided in completing the assessments in a more timely fashion.

In order to make the assessment forms more user friendly/shorter, and to improve access to services for clients, we eliminated the irrelevant questions and reduced the assessment form from 6 pages to 2 pages. In conclusion, a time reduction of 66% to conduct assessments was accomplished. Assessments went from taking 60 to 120 minutes to an average of 20 to 30 minutes to complete. As a result, the waitlist for PPOP was eliminated within 2 weeks of implementation.