Backstory

All over the world, health and wellness clinics are opening up in record numbers. Wellness clinics have a number of operational challenges because they are complex businesses offering a large variety of services and technologies. This is exacerbated by the fact that more and more technologies are making their way into clinics and the processes for different modalities can be overwhelming. NeoWave Health, a provider of health and wellness technologies, is the exclusive Canadian licensee for the Magnesphere and HALO relaxation/anti-stress technologies.
           

To quote Sol Avisar, CEO for NeoWave, “These technologies deliver personalized anti-stress signals through the internet directly to the home under the supervision of a trained clinician.  In this sense it isthe world’s first cloud based therapeutic.  At our head office in we have set up a best practices model for clinics across the country.  We have tremendous requirements for efficiency, consistency and quality in serving our market place.”

FuseExpertise  is expertise management software that is uniquely architected to capture, share and convert expertise into action and accountability. Core areas of expertise are best practices, productivity expertise, operational expertise and employee/intelligence expertise. NeoWave’s implementation of FuseExpertise incorporates all of these.

Problem

NeoWave’s specific challenges are as follow:

(1)   Clinic operational best practices

a.      As head office for Canada, NeoWave’s bestpractices clinic needs to set the example and provide the operational processes for clinics across Canada that adopt the Magnesphere and HALO technologies.

b.     These processes cannot be documents, or spreadsheets, but rather they needto be operational/executable – meaning that users need to initiate the process,follow it and complete it online. This meets their goal of retention, execution and accountability.

c.      Management must be able to see if a process is completed or not – basically an accountability dashboard.

d.     New staff will use the same process checklists for education, existing staff will use it for quality assurance, and management would use it for accountability.

(2)   Complex software reduced to specific functional tasks

a.      A variety of software is used to manage the business. Clinically, the Magneceutical software is used to manage and deliver relaxation protocols to clients. Appointment-Plus is used to empower patients to book and manage their own appointments online. InfusionSoft is used as the CRM primarily for managing relationships with licensed clinicians and prospects. Square is used for payment processing for clinical customers, and PayPal is used for payment processing to vendors.

b.     NeoWave needed these feature-rich and complex software products to be reduced to very specific operations. They use no more than 5% to15% of the functional capability of each software offering and what is used is specifically used to execute NeoWave’s business. Staff only need to know how to do transactions in the context of processes.

Solution

FuseExpertise was selected as the platform to capture the NeoWave expertise. It was recognized that the platform had to be able to document, from scratch, all of the operations of NeoWave – and FuseExpertise provided a consultant to understand the business model and decide how best to get things started.

FuseExpertise created a Management and Shareholders community as a starting point. Categories were set up as repositories of corporate policies and operational expertise, including general administration,accounting and finances, marketing and sales strategies, and legal matters; where it was deemed necessary, scanned copies of original agreements were uploaded into FuseExpertise. Several categories were added for storing minutes ofmeetings. A business intelligence section allows for the automatic receipt, via FuseExpertise data partnering, of emails addressed to pre-determined addresses(e.g. [email protected]"somedomain".com or [email protected]"somedomain".com).Data partnering is also used with the human resources category, capturing emails and resumes from individuals applying for advertised NeoWave positions; adding score card and assessment plugins to this category allows each candidate to be ranked for consideration. The clinic management section uses FuseExpertise(repeating) objects to capture information about the various clinics utilizing the Magnesphere technology, including scans of sales orders and signed agreements.

Outcome

With all of the major areas of expertise leakage addressed,including best practices and operational expertise, we can view the entire implementation as a success.

When the NeoWave staff gained familiarity with FuseExpertise, it became natural for them to create their own content under the My Expertise area. Checklists were created, and shared with others – some checklists grew into (repeatable) objects. Employees documented, for example,  such processes as the steps involved when taking on a new client – and the resulting checklist is monitored by management to ensure all appropriate actions are completed, every time.

Intelligence expertise is also being captured; ideas,research, prospects, partners, competitors, etc. are part of the overall solution. These are also based on email data partners on the categories that accept only input from employee personal and corporate emails. When you have a great idea, or meet a potential business partner at a party, you probably want to send that off right away to your team. That’s 24x7x365 intelligence that frequently evaporates. 

Reflection

“FuseExpertise uniquely provides us with an easy to use, low cost solution, delivered over the internet, that literally allows us to manage our business far better than companies many times our size,” said Sol Avisar.“All of our key client, clinical customer and management processes are captured in FuseExpertise. We can evolve them, use them repeatedly and hold everyone accountable for getting things done right all the time. We can share this expertise with clinics and new employees and get them up and running in days instead of weeks or months. “

The operational side of expertise was the biggest win because it speaks to quality and consistency and, ultimately, a better patient experience. A 24 step process for patient initiation will not be remembered 100% of the time by 100% of the staff. New staff would be seriously challenged to learn and remember – and this is just one process.  Ignoring quality, the time and business friction cost associated with broken and incomplete processes is enormous and ultimately affects the productivity of the business.

When you can inject a new process or collapse one, you routinely have this carry forward to the future. It’s automatic. No more over the water cooler conversation about new promises or dropped processes. The process is live, real time – there is no best before date, because it is always current.