Minitab Helps Louisiana Hospital Improve Care and Save Money

Healthcare quality professionals choose Minitab because its powerful methods and ease of use help them realize their initiatives and improve their bottom line.

Just ask Mary Ellen Pratt of Thibodaux Regional Medical Center in Thibodaux, Louisiana...

As Operations Manager, Pratt oversees Thibodaux's Six Sigma quality improvement program, which has tremendously raised the level of care the hospital provides. With the help of Minitab, the Six Sigma teams have reduced medication errors by 42%, UTIs (urinary tract infections) by 38%, and radiology turn-around time for inpatient results by 29% - improvements that have propelled Thibodaux into the top 1% of hospitals in the country for patient satisfaction.

The use of Minitab has also dramatically improved Thibodaux's fiscal health. Six Sigma projects, like the one that reduced inventory and supply costs by $489,000, have increased the hospital's operating margin to 12% and created a cash reserve of $24 million in just two years.

But perhaps the single most impressive - and lucrative - project has been the finance department's initiative to decrease its number of Accounts Receivable (AR) days.

At the start of the project, the team calculated that $3.3 million of hospital revenue was sitting in limbo because the related claims lacked the coding or processing necessary to collect it. By using Minitab's Regression feature to analyze their billing process, the team identified the factors that most significantly slowed the process, changed their coding procedures so that bills were ready much sooner, and reduced their average number of AR days by ten. With each AR day costing the hospital roughly $178,000, the project has saved Thibodaux nearly $2 million.

Pratt is obviously pleased with the results of her program, and credits much of its success to Minitab.

"I don't know how we'd do it without it," she said. "It's critical to get good information from your data and Minitab makes it very easy to do that. It takes the hard part out of statistics and lets you concentrate on what the analyses mean and how you want to respond to the information."

As one of the executives responsible for developing the staff's quality improvement skills, Pratt also appreciates how easy Minitab is to learn and use. "It's fantastic," she said. "Most of the Greenbelts I train are amazed with how easy it is to use. They get very excited when they realize what they can do with it."

Thibodaux's Greenbelt staff celebrate the completion of another successful Six Sigma quality improvement project.

And as someone who often has to communicate about the projects to others in the hospital, she also values the ReportPad, a tool within Minitab that helps create coherent, professional reports. "I use it a lot," she said. "It makes it very easy to save key analyses and graphs and copy them into PowerPoint later, and I like that I can add my own comments to help interpret the results and explain their significance."

Pratt, whose leadership goal is to stay on the big picture and remove the obstacles her staff faces, believes deeply in the power of Six Sigma. "Hospitals that embrace it will be those that succeed," she said.

And with a vision as broad as Pratt's and a statistics package that makes it easy for her team to realize it, Thibodaux is destined to be one of them.