Dr. Waters results speak for themselves and have yielded high praise. In her current role these results, across 14 medical centers and 120 outpatient facilities, include:
- Improved day-of-surgery cancellations by 45%, resulting in nearly $4M contribution to direct margins.
- Improved length of stay by 40% for a cardiovascular unit, resulting in nearly $1M impact.
- Improved lumbar laminectomy surgical pathways, decreasing direct cost by 24% and LOS by 43%.
- Succeeded in designing a machine learning algorithm for hospital census, resulting in labor savings of excess of $1M.
- Pivotal in implementing 50+ innovative processes through data science and leading change management initiatives annually to enhance overall operational efficiency; resulting in a 15:1 return on investment on department budget.
- Integral in achieving process excellence for projects completed 1/01/2022 to 6/30/23, results were > $11.9M in financial benefit to Kettering, including value-added to non-financial areas, such as quality efforts, patient satisfaction improvements, operational improvement data analyses, and operational improvement support. Other contributions included:
- Finance: PAT- Reduced Same Day Cancellation of Surgery, resulting in a mean of 3.9% cancellation achieved (If these results can be sustained this would result in a $3.8M impact to direct margin.
- Finance: KH OP Therapy Operational Efficiencies (FOCUS Project); as of May 2023, the team exceeded their goal of 3% remit denials, achieving .62% remit denials. If extrapolating back to known remit denial amounts of 4.3% totaling ~$2.5M from May 2022 to May 2023, the team expects to see remit denial amounts drop to ~$750K/year if able to sustain, demonstrating a $1.75M improvement.
- Quality Scores: The HAPI Quality Team, as of 12/2022, achieved a 37% Improvement; as of 12/2023, HAPI SREs were approximately <36 in 2022 saving an estimated $522K.
- Quality Scores: The Falls Quality Team, as of 10/30/23 saw approximately 76 fewer falls than in 2022, saving ~$500K based on the $6,694/fall metric.
- Patient Satisfaction Scores: Front Line Rounding Electronic Forms. Nursing continues to use the tool for audit processes in Patient Experience domains. This project is a significant soft savings, estimated at hundreds of hours per year across the system, representing hours that Nursing Leadership normally would take to gather similar information through spreadsheets, or not performed at all.
- Patient Satisfaction Scores: KHMC Trayline (FOCUS Project). The temperature of coffee delivered within the range increased from 2% to 75% following the test of change. Further testing indicated 10% of “Hot Bottom” devices used to maintain plate temperatures were defective. Defective units were repaired/replaced further increasing performance in the area.