MDapproach Q&A

What is MDapproach™ and how does it help clients save money?
MDapproach is Hayes’ methodology to provide clients with a time-bound action plan for streamlining operations and improving performance.  It is a scalable assessment that can be tailored to focus on one or more of the following areas: patient access, patient billing, clinical workflow, and IT.

How is it different than other revenue cycle or clinical improvement analyses?
We realize that analyzing revenue cycle operations or clinical workflow isn’t something that our clients are doing for the first time.  We don’t spend time and money simply to restate the obvious; we move quickly to uncover root causes.  This allows us to spend more time evaluating strategic alternatives for each challenge.

What is the difference between recommendations and strategic alternatives?
Recommendations suggest “what to do” about a specific challenge.  Strategic alternatives present options for “how to do it” within the constraints of your organization.  Let’s face it, two organizations may share the same challenge, but their approach to solving it may be completely different.  We typically provide three strategic alternatives for each recommendation. The costs, benefits, and challenges for each strategic alternative are provided to help clients choose which alternative is best for them. It’s different for each organization. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all.

Another key aspect of the approach is “defining guiding principles.”  What does this mean?
Many organizations do not make the time to consciously identify the risks they are willing to take, the cultural challenges they are willing to confront, or the investments that they are willing to make in order to reach their goals. This is why most improvement efforts ultimately stall.  Creating principles isn’t easy, but it is essential to an organization’s long-term success.  During an MDapproach engagement, we will work with organizations to create a list of specific principles that will guide our efforts and continue to help them reach their goals in a focused, expedient manner.

What is the roadmap?
At the end of an MDapproach engagement, we deliver a high-level, time-based work plan that synchronizes recommendations and their associated strategic alternatives (i.e., costs, benefits, and challenges). The roadmap illustrates the sequence, magnitude – and most importantly, the benefit of improvements to all stakeholders.

What do clients like best about MDapproach?
Clients appreciate our participative approach. For example, instead of going off on our own and coming back with a stack of written recommendations, we have scheduled milestones along the way to create principles, review findings, draw conclusions, make recommendations, choose strategic alternatives, and develop a time-bound roadmap.

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