Introduction to Service Innovation and Management

This module begins with an overview of the course and the process improvement project. Next, you will learn about the new processes and technologies that healthcare innovation can bring to improve the customer experience. You will explore healthcare ecosystems and the challenges that healthcare organizations face. You will then begin work on your process improvement plan by laying the foundation and specifying the context in which your process occurs. You will begin researching and exploring organizational processes that could benefit from process improvement and how to begin planning for those process improvements.

The exact definition of organizational culture is debated: Is it the patterns of behavior of employees? The language and jargon used? The types of communications, actions, beliefs, values, and traditions of the organization? Organizational culture is all of these things, as well as how these things interact and combine to determine the degree to which staff, customers, and stakeholders identify with the organization. In healthcare organizations, the patient population drives much of the organization’s culture and success. Understanding (ideally informed by data analytics) the culture is critical to understand when considering implementing a new change or process inside that organization. This module will describe the extent to which the organizational culture represents the foundation on which excellence customer service is built and can be improved upon. Additionally, you will begin to expand on your process improvement plan by identifying the the operational process that you would like to improve or redesign throughout this course.

In process improvement, the term "operational management" is used to describe the planning, design, implementation, and continuous monitoring of the provision of services. Operations managers in healthcare, like in every industry, have responsibilities in both strategy and day-to-day operations to ensure that the services provided are well managed so that the organization remains competitive. Processes must be well-designed, aligned, and optimized to better support the patient journey. In this module, you will review the early stages of process development while focusing on approaches to planning for process change. Next, you will engage in process mapping and identify the redundancies, workflows, handoffs, and subsystems involved in processes. You will create a model design, and plan out the initial deployments of improvements.