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Ron Galbraith

Editor's note: Solidus Co., an investor in onFocus | Healthcare, is also an investor in Medical News Inc., a subsidiary of SouthComm Communications, Inc.

With the U.S. economy in recession, hospitals are looking to do more with less. Brentwood-based onFocus | Healthcare believes its products and services can help hospitals and other provider organizations do just that.

"They need a higher level of execution. Our clients are telling us now that they have to get it right the first time. There's no margin for error, and the stakes have increased in terms of their shareholders' and other stakeholders' expectations," said onFocus President and CEO Steven Mason.

Founded in 1985 as Management 21 Inc., the company offered strategic planning, leadership development and other consulting services primarily to healthcare clients.

"The primary focus has always been on healthcare, and over the years the decision was made to commit to that market," Mason said. "It became clear to us that we needed to put that stake in the ground."

In August 2008, infused with capital from local investment firm Solidus Co., M21 rebranded itself as onFocus |Healthcare and launched a new Web-based software product designed to help hospitals improve performance at all levels. "We looked at what we were doing with our healthcare clients, and we also looked at what was needed in the market and decided if we could automate our expertise into a strategic-planning and performance-management tool, then it would help our clients more, and it wouldn't require consultants to work so intensively with the organization," Mason recalled.

Called onFocus | epm for "enterprise performance management," the company's new offering facilitates the creation and execution of multiple hospital strategies.

onFocus Chairman Ron Galbraith said creation of hospital strategic goals "is not that difficult" – data sources are available and hospitals are more sophisticated than ever before when it comes to understanding their community and their competition. "Where they have not become as sophisticated is taking that strategy and really executing it, and executing it with accountability throughout the organization and with a degree of transparency about who in the organization is working on the strategy, what they need and what kind of progress they're making," he said.

Thus, onFocus | epm offers four modules to help hospitals set an eye to the future and measure progress. The first part helps hospital leaders create and define a vision. The strategic performance management tool "allows people in a very robust yet very simple approach to literally name their strategy," Galbraith said, and then identify "critical success factors" to monitor and, if necessary, recalibrate the steps toward success.

The second epm module is an operations performance management tool used to identify and monitor the day-to-day activities necessary to take care of patients, physicians, family members and others, from clinical and safety activities to financial and quality concerns.

"Our module will allow a hospital to identify all of those pieces of their operation, identify an owner for each one – typically a manager or team leader – identify a way to measure it and then set a variance," Galbraith explained. When a measure approaches variance, the leader in charge of that activity receives an e-mail alert, which even suggests an action plan to correct that variance. "We've kept the level of sophistication high while keeping the ability to use it at a very practical, functional level," he said.

The third component of the software aids hospital leaders to set a strategy for and follow the progress of initiatives that aren't part of daily operations, such as the need for a compliance plan or marketing plan, or the introduction of a new service line.

The fourth module is a suite of tools to assess the attitudes and abilities of the people in the organization. Are physicians aligned with a new hospital strategy? Are employees ready for the challenge of the next Joint Commission visit?

"By assessing these things proactively, your capacity to deal with them and involve those people early on rather than struggling with a new initiative downstream is invaluable in today's climate," Galbraith said.

Key components are leadership development and team building. In fact, along with the software, onFocus' trademarked Breakthrough Leadership Workshops are a series of three-hour sessions designed to provide working managers and leaders with critical skills to move their organization toward breakthroughs. Having measured leadership behavior in healthcare for 20 years, Galbraith said the company "probably has the largest dataset of what it takes to be an effective leader."

Of the nine employees in the company's Brentwood office, some are consultants who work closely with clients while others are information-technology experts constantly tweaking the software to improve its performance. "A refinement process is intentionally part of the product's evolution," Mason said.

onFocus | epm went live last April with its first client, a large tertiary-care facility in Georgia with 3,500 employees. Mason said the implementation was "seamless and fairly compelling," leading to a search for needed capital to expand the customer base. That's when Solidus stepped in.

With three clients so far, Mason said the mission for onFocus in 2009 is to take the product to the next 20 hospital customers. "We have most of those already identified, although those deals are not closed," he said.

For more information about onFocus | Healthcare, visit www.onfocushealthcare.com

Tags:

Breakthrough Leadership Workshops, Management 21 Inc, onFocus Healthcare, onFocus | Healthcare, Ron Galbraith, Solidus Inc, Steven Mason

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