Our Services
“Our business is making your business better”. To that end, we deliver services to meet your needs.  Since 1980, businesses have used the Malcom Baldrige framework to assess and improve their performance. Not all companies require assistance in every category, but award-winning businesses have systematic processes in place to address each category.

These services are presented in a menu format for you to assess, prioritize, and select services that best reflect your business needs.
Governing Board Development

New for Governing Boards: Linking Quality to Strategy and Operations

There has been a proliferation of efforts to measure how various hospitals and doctors perform and no one has found the task easy. What processes should be measured? What kinds of changes improve performance? Research has proven that measurement and transparency is key to improvement, but many board members lack the knowledge and skills to work with executive and clinical leaders to create change.

Linking Quality to Strategy and Operations will help board members understand the quality of care being delivered and how to establish clear and dependable monitoring systems to discover hidden problems and uncover subtleties that result in higher performance. This comprehensive workshop will:

  • Outline who measures what and why.
  • Review information on value-based purchasing, transparency and pay-for-performance.
  • Explore how to measure progress using dashboards.
  • Examine measures and identify the most appropriate for your hospital or health system.
  • Demonstrate the difference between reactive and predictive thinking and how to shift to predictive.
  •  Review best practices to assess and monitor quality and increase reliability.

Balanced Scorecards  will be reviewed in-depth and attendees will be asked to meet with the hospital’s quality director to review data and bring their quality dashboard/scorecard to the workshop. Processes and outcomes will be explored to achieve strategic priorities. Alumni of the MHA Excellence in Governance Fellowship consider this content extremely insightful, stating they found “immense value in going deeper into the “weeds” of quality” and that they “gained a new perspective on our quality and safety measures and feel empowered to take action.”

Strategic Human Resource Management
Development of a "preferred employee" strategy to ensure that competent staff are available when and where you need them to meet your strategic goals.
  • Customer-focused job descriptions
  • Interviewing for values and behaviors – finding a good corporate match
  • Competency-based orientation tools
  • Value-based behaviors
  • Training and development (Interpersonal communication, communication across gender and generations, and communication across personality types)
  • Team building
  • Leadership development (360 Evaluation, core requirements, corporate imperatives, and elective requirement

* Training methods vary baed upon content and skill required.  Experiential, instructor led, self learning, and computer-based methods are available.   

Question to answer:
Do you have the people you need to achieve your short and long term goals?
Do they know what core processes drive required results?
Do they know how well those processes are functioning?
Do they have the skills they need?
Will you be able to keep them? 
Leadership Development
Collaborative development of key business factors by your leadership team.
  • Mission development: Crystalize a common understanding of your mission that becomes the basis of your strategic plan, measurement system, and marketing strategy
  • Vision development: craft a future state that delivers where you want your business to be in the next three to five years
  • Service: Define the service ethic and standards that differentiate you from your competitors
  • Core values: Values are the filter through which you make business decisions
  • The Baldrige Framework: identify essential inter-dependent elements that drive performance
Questions to answer:
Are you achieving your mission?
Where do you want to be in the next 3-5 years?
Are you getting there?
How do you know?
Process Design, Management, and Improvement
Implementation of a model to design and achieve efficient and effective-processes
  • Flow analysis – identify critical customer contact points in your processes
  • Process redesign
  • Best practices identification
  • Risk analysis
  • Performance management
  • Supplier management
Questions to answer:
What are your strategically significant processes?
How well do they function?
Does waste and rework drive up costs? Cause delays?
Do inefficient processes cost you customers?
Do you inherit defects from your suppliers?
Is some work redundant?
Strategic Business Planning
Develop a comprehensive strategic plan that not only delivers short and long term goals, but also
delivers your:
  • Communication strategy
  • Key resource requirements
  • Alignment of strategy, outcomes, operations, processes, and people
  • Customer Service ethic and standards
  • Measurement of strategically significant goals
  • Identification of core processes that deliver desired outcomes
  • Human resource plan to complement the strategic plan
  • Process design, management, and improvement of core processes
  • Balanced scorecard to track progress to plan

Questions to answer:
How are you going to get where you need to be in the next 3-5 years?
How will you know whether or not you are getting there?
Customer & Stakeholder Satisfaction
Development and implementation of a customer service strategy to promote loyalty and growth in
  • market share
  • Identification of customers (Internal and external)
  • Identification of customer requirements and expectations
  • Customer feedback systems (Focus groups, customer satisfaction surveys, employee opinion surveys)
  • Analysis of customer satisfaction feedback
  • Customer-focused performance improvement
Questions to answer:
Are your customers loyal to you?
What percent do you lose annually?
Why do you lose them?
How can you prevent that from happening?
Information & Analysis
Information and Analysis Implementation of the information system required to provide feedback on attainment of your strategic goals, mission and vision.

  • Identification of information requirements
  • Identification of existing strategically significant information
  • Validation of current information for accuracy and reliability
  • Determination of how best to use information to deliver results
  • Design and implementation of a performance management system (Collect strategically significant information, transform data into knowledge, turn knowledge into action, and  turn action into results)
Questions to answer:
What information do you have?
How do you know it is any good?
What do you do with it?
Is it driving require results?
How do you know that you are measuring the “right” things?
How do you know that you are setting the “right” goals?
Business Results
Analysis of strategically significant results compared to best practice and long-term goals.
Progressive improvement demonstrated in:
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Customer retention
  • Profit margin
  • Process performance
  • Quality outcomes
  • Community benefit
Questions to answer:
Do these results deliver your mission?
Will these results realize your vision?
Will these results set you apart from your competitors?
Our business is making your business better.