The old business adage is still true: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And the more you measure, the more you can control. At Molina Healthcare of Ohio, tracking results has helped us deliver the quality services our members need, improve health outcomes, hit targeted profit margins and reach virtually every company goal.
Measuring results is the key to identifying what you’re doing right, and what you need to improve. Whether your business is already tracking progress or still contemplating how to begin, the following strategies can help you be more efficient — and ultimately more successful.
Set specific goals
A goal like “make higher profits” is a fine start. But your targets must be specific, measurable and time-bound to produce results you can use.
For Molina, standards for quality, delivery of needed services and member satisfaction are set by health care industry standards such as NCQA (quality), HEDIS (health outcomes) and CAHPS (customer satisfaction). Key performance indicators measure each mandated requirement, and we measure these goals on a monthly basis to make sure we’re on track.
Some examples are:
- Our call centers aim to answer calls within 30 seconds on average.
- We gauge improved health by tracking costs for members enrolled in High Risk Care Management.
- We turn around all prior authorization requests within regulatory time frames and pay 90 percent of claims or more in 30 days.
All these objectives are aspirational and can be challenging, but we’re proud to regularly exceed them. So how does a company decide where to set marks, and how to get there?
Plan, plan, plan
Molina dedicates a great deal of thought, time and money to developing our operating plan — and in the end, it saves us from overspending on all three. A team of experts, from multiple departments, drafts the plan with tactics for reaching goals in growth, financial performance, quality, customer experience and employee engagement, among other areas.
Before it’s deployed, our executive committee reviews the operating plan, identifying any barriers and collaborating on solutions.
Run a nimble operation
When an organization grows as rapidly as we have, it can get more difficult to institute changes. But if you think of a small company as a single person and a big company as a team, you see that the second one often has more power to implement sweeping changes and innovations.
At Molina, we stay nimble by maintaining transparency. Sharing the results we so carefully measure in management and all-staff meetings, our employees remain well informed of the company’s performance and can connect the dots of how their work contributes to the overall success of the company. This allows us to celebrate our successes, learn where we fall short and quickly make adjustments to get back on track.
For instance, a survey revealed that potential members of MyCare Ohio, which coordinates care for people eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, didn’t understand the benefits we offer. We quickly deployed an outbound-calling campaign to educate this population about our plan — and exceeded our enrollment target.
