Hi Team,
Through May 31, we have already helped close to 173K patients. We appreciate the continued commitment from all team members to ensure that patients get the help that they need as quickly as possible.
We have defined clear objectives and key results for 2023. Through May, we are on track for 7 of 13 key results and are still forecasting to deliver on all 12 of 13 by year-end. The only one that we are lowering expectations for is +55 Customer NPS. We have had a difficult time reducing the excess backlog and therefore patient turnaround times remain too high. We need to remove the excess backlog and keep patient turnaround times down to win back the confidence of our customers.
Build a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and engaged culture.
We are ensuring that we have an engaged team. We are executing a comprehensive employee engagement plan with the help of employee engagement subcommittees to ensure that eHealth Technologies is a great place to work. Below are the actions that have already been taken along with actions that are scheduled to be taken by each employee engagement theme:
Theme: Staff appropriately and stop requiring OT
Actions Completed:
- Updated demand and staffing model for operations and capacity management model for IT
- Staffing appropriately to keep up with volume demand
- Hired third party consultancy for hiring right talent
Action Items on Deck:
- Overstaff Operations via the Operational Excellence Team
- Customer Success Management to engage with customers to properly forecast patient volume so we can staff appropriately
- Ensuring operation teams have the appropriate number of members cross-trained in multiple functions
- Prioritizing the most critical operations work during normal business hours to hit our KPIs and reduce the need for OT
- Communicating clear specific goals and objectives for any future requested OT
Theme: Ensure quality and attainable metrics.
Actions Completed:
- Operations Management reevaluated, metrics and bonus structure, and piloting new pay for performance in June (results driven vs. quantity driven)
Action Items on Deck:
- Metric goals to be determined based on team performance, not management requirement (pending result of pilot)
- Evaluating all operational metrics and piloting changes
- Improve overall onboarding and training experience to better equip team members for success
- Provide specific guidance (script) to ensure that the right actions are taken to propel a case forward
- Establish enhanced criteria for Quality Assurance (QA) that will allow Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to determine why a case is not closing/find opportunities for coaching
Theme: Improve communication and provide it more frequently.
Actions Completed:
- Now providing a weekly company update to all staff including key accomplishments, challenges, and focus areas, as well as important updates, reminders, and learning resources (started 5/8)
- Updated and rolled out the Leadership Communications Guide which includes best communications and meeting practices, templates for messaging and meeting agendas, etc. – presented in biweekly Leadership Meeting on 6/8
- Include sales forecasts, launch forecasts, and the demand and staffing model in biweekly leadership meetings – received ELT buy-in and will begin to share in 6/22 leadership meeting
Action Items on Deck:
- Working with Ops leadership to create and share a company performance leaderboard – proposal in process
- Including Ops stakeholders in Agile teams to provide feedback regarding IT systems working properly – proposal in process
- Collaborating with HR to create and deliver a communications training to managers
- Collaborating with IT to create Microsoft Teams education for staff
Theme: Deliver working systems/Improve reliability of systems
Actions Completed:
- Increase Quality Control for new releases with CAB process
- Extend IT support availability to 7:30 p.m. EST
- Establish Support Call Tree for Ops OT
- Onboarded MSK and COH Pathology to WQ Outreach successfully
- Built product management department to properly define the problem and solution
- Overhauled product development process and team to deliver solutions – Q1 results 3 for 3
Action Items on Deck:
- Hiring Quality Leader for IT
- Onboarding remainder of City of Hope and Stanford teams to WQ Outreach
- Hiring Director of IT Infrastructure
- Increasing visibility of development work and bugs
- Improving issue reporting processes
Theme: Make sure that team members are paid fairly, recognized, and supported (with adequate training, career advancement opportunities and management)
Actions Completed:
- Raises given this year
- Hired third party consultant to evaluate compensation and benefits
- Spot bonuses implemented for high performers
- Greater team member recognition opportunities added to staff meetings, companywide town halls, board meetings, employee newsletters, and companywide communications
- More career advancement opportunities – roles are open, hiring for high-level roles, making career advancement opportunities more visible to team members
- Hired VP of Human Resources – start date June 26
- Hired experienced Operations Training Manager
- Employee engagement team outings
- Management/Trainer in the Duffield office
- Updated and rolled out the company’s Leadership Communications Guide
Action Items on Deck:
- Hiring HR Training/Professional Development Management
- Holding leadership accountable to ensure Leadership Communications Guide is followed, including making sure 1:1s are scheduled by the end of June and completed by the end of July and every month after
- Creating a medical terminology cheat sheet for companywide distribution and adding to onboarding process
Deliver on customer expectations.
We made some progress here through May but an outage on May 31st set us back. We need to keep the focus on providing a reliable infrastructure so that the Operations Team can close cases and eliminate the excess backlog. We have been and will continue to hire team members so that we have a “bench” moving forward so that we can keep the backlog at the appropriate level.
Move relationship from vendor to strategic partner with key customers.
The struggle to deliver on customer expectations has made it difficult to move from vendor to strategic partner with key customers. The Customer Success team is proactively managing our customers and is now sharing what changes we made to improve patient turnaround time as well as what changes we made to avoid getting into a state of excess backlog again. The team is always meeting face-to-face with a number of key and strategic customers to advance the relationship.
Transition from a service to a health care technology and analytics company.
We are rebranding to show how we differentiate through technology today. We are overhauling our website and our company overview presentation. We are building a world-class product development organization to manage opportunities in the funnel which include decreasing records retrieval turnaround time and continuing to improve productivity and delivering actionable insights (clinical trial patient screening, clinical summaries).
Grow through expansion with strategic customers, addition of new key customers and adjacent markets.
Sales delays continued throughout the month of May due to a number of factors including financial challenges within most hospitals, our high turnaround time with existing customers, and our inability to provide prospects with a compelling reason to buy. We are updating our sales process to ensure that we are able to provide quantifiable value to prospects prior to calling an opportunity to close.
Thank you for your continued support for our customers and patients.
Regards,
Dan