Achieving performance breakthroughs in an HMO business process through quality planning

Kaiser Permanente's Georgia Region commissioned a quality planning team to design a new process to improve payments to its suppliers and vendors. The result of the team's effort was a 73 percent reduction in cycle time. This team's experiences point to the advantages of process redesign as a quality planning model, as well as some general guidelines for its most effective use in teams. If quality planning project teams are carefully configured, sufficiently expert in the existing process, and properly supported by management, organizations can achieve potentially dramatic improvements in process performance using this approach.