Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation: Top 3 Strategic Plan Execution Tips

November 20, 2023

Shiv Bhatia

Strategic Plan Execution: Govern, Educate, and Enable

Once you have your digital transformation plan, the next step is to execute against that plan. It’s critical to follow it, document changes, assess impacts, and communicate. Governance, clear communication, and effective decision-making infrastructure are critically important. Do not underestimate the need for an Enterprise Program Management or Strategic Operating Model.

Top 3 Execution Best Practices

1. Project and Business Artifacts

Align on a standard set of projects and/or operational artifacts that you will use to track progress. Leverage schedules, reports and RAID logs to ensure that everyone involved and interested is following the same plan.

2. Change Management

Change is inevitable. Establish your internal change management processes to reach the grassroots. Change managements starts from the top and cannot be one & done. Plan on having a series of touch points (townhalls, weekly newsletters providing progress etc.) to continue to generate excitement about the new software at all levels.

3. Metrics

Keep your metrics front and center. Use them to motivate the teams, adjust and improve. Metrics need to drive your decisions. Test and stick to your benchmarks for an acceptable pass rate. Metrics also ensure accountability.

Top 3 Execution Mistakes

1. Limited Visibility

Limited visibility into progress, issues, and decisions that need to be made can multiply disruption in schedules and resolution. It can also build distrust amongst the teams involved. Always overcommunicate and ensure everyone is following the same plan. Sharing key artifacts across teams helps mitigate risk and disruption.

2. Confusion and Bad Decisions

Understand any impacts of the change to the overall project or business operations, reporting, timing, staffing, and support. The fastest way to sink a good plan is by not managing change effectively. Without a change management process, you will likely miss details around the impacts of the change.

3. Gut Decisions

Rely on metrics and data to inform decisions throughout the execution. Cutting corners on the time you dedicate to testing to hit a date means you will have to cut scope. Cutting scope means you are introducing unnecessary risk to your business. If you have a plan to test 100 E2E test scenarios that cover your critical business operations, and you reduce that to 50 E2E test cases you can expect at least half of your critical operations will likely have an issue that you discover in Production.

HealthEdge: Healthcare Payer Digital Transformation and Professional Services

HealthEdge’s Professional Services provides expertise and support to accelerate your digital transformation. To become a next-generation health plan, you need a digital foundation that enables you to provide a transparent and person-centric experience at lower cost, higher quality, and higher service levels. HealthEdge® solutions provide that foundation – and HealthEdge Professional Services deliver the expertise and support to make the process swift, sure, and effective.

Learn more about HealthEdge Professional Services.

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