Healthcare IT pro Elyse Nielsen has one of the best-named blogs around: AntiClue. She also has a recent post on workflow. In it, she lists what she sees as the top six workflow issues:
- Automating a bad process will just make it fail faster and magnify the problem. This is very similar to Steven’s First Law of IT: Don’t Automate Broken Processes. It’s absolutely the #1 issue.
- A clinical process may be the art of the workaround. This is a relative of item #1. Workarounds happen, and indeed are often necessary… but don’t automate them unless the workaround itself is the best way to solve the problem long term.
- Avoid grandiose workflows. Yup, don’t boil the ocean. The 80/20 rule should be your watchword. Keep it simple. Then revise as you learn more.
- (Specific to healthcare. I don’t know how to translate it well.)
- Not everyone flows work the same way even when they perform parallel functions. It would be easier for you if they did… but the goal is to make it easier for the users, not the project team.
- Engineer for the mainstream, not all the exceptions. Here’s another version of the 80/20 rule.
I’m not sure I’d list these as my top six, mostly because I think 1+2 and 3+6 are redundant… but they are important no matter how you number them.
Improving workflow may be the most significant thing an external professional (e.g., outside the user/customer community) can do to help out a team. It’s often surprisingly simple, at least at the 80/20 level. Junk simply accretes on processes. If you can get out the pressure washer and scrub off the accretions, you can make a dramatic difference. (Just make sure the spray from the pressure washer doesn’t hit the users; don’t wash the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.)
