Colorado Dream Team
Over the past year we’ve had the great pleasure of partnering with Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing Process Improvement Team (PIT) and Public Consulting Group (PCG), working with counties and medical assistance sites across the state to deliver Lean coaching through model site visits and learning sessions. The goal of the project, funded by a CMS Medicaid grant, was to empower county Medicaid eligibility sites with tools to address everyday workflow challenges so they can continuously improve program outcomes.
Kicking-off our work together in October 2019, Koné Consulting began regularly traveling from Seattle to various locations in Colorado, some quite remote. Consultant Karin Ellis has fond memories of visiting the San Luis Valley – both the four+ hour scenic road trip and the ride in a turboprop aircraft watching the sunset over the mountain pass. In case you missed the photo evidence and details of Karin’s adventures, you can read more here.
Our owner and president, Alicia Koné, distinctly recalls her turbo-prop plane ride through a snowstorm to Durango, CO for a learning session with counties in the southwest quadrant of the state. At the time, she didn’t know her thrilling flight was nothing compared to the snowy mountain passes the Gunnison County staff drove through to get to the session. The harrowing travel was worth it when the entire group got to celebrate PIT Performance Improvement Specialist Arturo Serrano’s birthday that evening at a local brewpub.
In March, what started as an in-person delivery model swiftly shifted to virtual workshops, meetings and site-visits as sites and team members adjusted to working from home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although we missed meeting our collaborators in-person, we enjoyed continuing our work virtually while learning together how to best utilize Zoom as a workshop and site-visit tool.
What stood out most was the warm welcome and collaborative nature of the PIT team that also includes Nicole Duran Jones, the PIT Supervisor, and Vanessa Garcia, the other PI Specialist. The PIT team and Koné Consulting share the value of connecting people through “breaking bread” and the coffee, refreshments, and lunches were always a success and helped everyone stay caffeinated and satiated during full days. The PIT team and the eligibility site staff we had the pleasure of meeting also generously shared insights about their communities – the beautiful and interesting sites to see, unique weather patterns, and even local agricultural knowledge - their affection for the great state of Colorado and the people that reside there was always present.
PIT shared some result highlights from the project which included two sites developing key initial plans for becoming paperless offices – transitioning to an imaging system; and all sites benefitted from learning Lean tools such as the A3, Value Stream Mapping, Fishbone tool, The 5 Whys, Waste Walks, and Lean Coffee. The state also changed the Colorado Benefits Management System (CBMS) platform, which changed the user interface for staff (aka CBMS Transformation).
We look forward to hearing from our PIT and PCG friends in the future and are especially excited to learn how their ongoing process improvement implementation impacts their good work.