Creato announced today that three separate health systems have licensed the COMPASS® Quality Management System in the past week. This includes Holy Family Memorial in Manitowoc WI, Hendrick Health System in Abilene TX, and Grady Health in Atlanta. While Holy Family Memorial has been a client of Creato for over 5 years, both Hendrick and Grady are new clients to the company. COMPASS creates a “project portfolio management system” to boost productivity.
Project Portfolio Management is a fairly new discipline in healthcare arenas, but the demands of the Affordable Care Act and similar regulatory requirements have put pressure on operating margins. The use of PPM systems can increase the productivity of an organization by 20-35%, according to Sparta Systems, a firm that consults with industry in selecting and optimizing PPM systems like COMPASS.
The rapid adoption of COMPASS is a sign that hospitals embrace the concept of project portfolio management, according to the company’s Managing Partner. “We’ve been hopeful that hospitals would abandon their efforts to coordinate and manage projects on Excel spreadsheets,” notes Ian R. Lazarus, “and the market reception to COMPASS clearly indicates that this is happening.” COMPASS provides a dynamic system for prioritizing projects, coordinating improvement work, and creating a level of transparency and accountability that is needed to make healthcare organizations more efficient and competitive, he adds. The product brings a level of sophistication to an organization’s improvement capability that isolated spreadsheets are not able to provide.
At Holy Family Memorial, the COMPASS system will be expected to help the organization to formalize an already robust performance improvement department that completes several “lean” related projects every year. At Hendrick Health System, the product will help to launch their new lean program, and at Grady Health, the COMPASS system will help them to prioritize, manage, and fulfill requests for research initiatives that impact quality care. Grady Health is one of the largest public academic healthcare systems in the U.S.
About Creato: Creato Performance Solutions has been providing technologies and training to support corporate performance improvement for over 20 years. Today, Creato is a leading provider in the U.S. of Lean and Six Sigma deployment, and Project Portfolio Management products including the COMPASS® Quality Management System. Their combined classroom and online training programs are available a variety of other channel partners across the U.S. A recent study of 150 projects completed by Creato clients over the past 10 years revealed an average return on investment of 7:1.