Spectrum Healthcare: Organizing Around Patients

Spectrum Healthcare, a multispecialty medical practice in Maine, wanted to improve operational efficiency across surgical operations, quality, marketing, clinical operations, physiotherapy champions, compliance, medical staff services, billing, and IT. IT, clinical and operational leaders aimed to enhance collaboration across departments and improve their ability to drive operational changes effectively.

Spectrum was looking at several key initiatives - Consolidating/Evolving their network of clinics as they grow, Going digital with an electronic medical record, introducing and extending new models of care such as telemedicine and enabling radiologists to work remotely. The urgency for improvement skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic which obviously accelerated the need for several of these business shifts and created some additional challenges and opportunities.

Before adopting Agile, Spectrum Healthcare had relied on a traditional project management method to implement changes. However, this approach of managing fragmented communication and collaboration between IT and operational team suffered from delayed feedback, rework, frustration, missed timelines and mediocre outcomes, ultimately affecting patient care and work experience for everyone involved.

Spectrum realized it needs to pivot much more swiftly than its current collaboration structures and ways of working allowed for. It chose to work with Yuval due to his unique expertise and experience applying agility at scale beyond the boundaries of IT.

Spectrum Healthcare leaders set their sights on faster time to market with better outcomes on their strategic cross-cutting initiatives - with leading indicators being improved collaboration between IT and operational leaders and faster integrative feedback loops as these business initiatives were being developed. The first notable achievements were the completion of a clinic consolidation and the rapid deployment of telemedicine services during the pandemic. Teams also shifted focus on high-priority projects and became more predictable.

Spectrum chose to use agile to tackle these cross-functional business initiatives. In order to work effectively on several initiatives that included synergy and shared expertise, we decided to leverage a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) ART construct.

The engagement started a strategic workshop where IT and business/operational leaders learned about SAFe (using Leading SAFe), explored and created a blueprint for how Agile principles could be applied to their specific context. A Value Stream Identification workshop followed, mapping out the Operational Value Stream (the patient journey) and the Development Value Stream (improvements to that journey). We launched an Agile Release Train (ART) with cross-functional teams working on key initiatives, including telemedicine and remote radiology access.

Our work together included training leaders, identifying appropriate way to organize around value and collaboration, and facilitating and supporting initial cycles through the new way of working, enabling inspection and adaptation to tweak the approach to Spectrum’s needs.