Making Medicare Sustainable

What is a proposed title of your project?

Using six sigma to make Medicare sustainable without significant burdens on beneficiaries

Describe the project you have in mind.

I am going to look into the role that the various six sigma tools can play in enabling Medicare achieve its objectives to its customers, primarily that of improving its service operations. If applied, these tools can put Medicare in a position where it would deliver a higher quality patient care at a lower cost with better quality and at a faster rate. These tools also have the ability to reduce or completely eliminate waste in Medicare.

What question(s) will be answered by your research?

What does Six Sigma mean for the Service Industry?

What is the link between speed of service and quality?

How can waste be identified?

How satisfied are Medicaid customers of the services provided to them?

How can Medicaid costs be reduced?

Why are you interested in pursuing this project? How will it benefit you?

In the past, Six Sigma has been a tool that was used in the manufacturing sector to improve processes and eventually the quality of the end product. Today, in the Services industries, there is an increase in the application of six sigma tools as businesses have identified that the cost that is associated with performing tasks that no value from a customer's standpoint is greater than that in a manufacturing sector where there is an actual product. There is also a greater potential of generating more revenue by improving the speed and quality of a service than there is in attempting to reduce cost.

Pursuing this project would hopefully prove that organizations like Medicare and the federal government can have a strategic advantage by reducing services costs if they can improve the speed, quality and costs of providing these services. This is where Lean Six Sigma plays a major role. There are major opportunities for applying these Six Sigma concepts with the goal of improving the operations and outcomes of medical care to patients who are in the Medicaid system.

How will the project benefit the field, your company, and/or another firm?

The six sigma approach would improve the quality of Medicaid services to meet patients expectations as well as improving the profitability and cash flow of the healthcare organization.

One of the key areas of cost containment is by improving the quality of care provided to patients. This is by far one of the most important element of improving the healthcare delivery system. This would result in the reduction of hospital readmissions, reduction in the number of hospital acquired conditions and also an improvement of physician quality reporting. These could potentially save the system about $15 billion during a ten year period.

Another area of cost reduction is in reforming the system of heath care delivery and finally getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse.

The intent of applying Lean Six Sigma is to gain a better understanding of what patients understand value to be and what the expectations are of delivering this value.