‘How did Makati Med do it?’

Q: We’re a new and small hospital. Our goal is to quickly raise our patient base by providing them with quality health and medical care. We could not afford a market survey so we resorted to “benchmarking.”

In our meetings on our benchmarking data, we decided to focus on Makati Med. In the first half decade of the new millennium, practically everyone we talked was disappointed with Makati Med. Some were even angry. Then toward the end of the millennium, almost everyone we asked was happy and had only good words for Makati Med. We’d like to learn from that transformation. How did Makati Med do it?

A: What we know about Makati Med Center (MMC) comes from anecdotes.

What do our accumulated anecdotal evidence consistently show?

The MMC transformation from bad to good, from very bad to very good is not only a matter of what Makati Med did. It is a question of who did it.

Turnaround artist

Who is this person? She is the MMC president, Rose Montenegro. We learned that no other than MVP (Manny V. Pangilinan) himself took Rose out of retirement and gave her this “mission impossible” assignment.

That was 2007 after MVP’s Metro Pacific acquired the financially deteriorating MMC.

We understand MVP chose Rose because she has made a reputation as a “turnaround artist.”

What did Rose do?

She applied two basic management skills—after a period of “diagnostics,” Rose decided what’s the right thing to do. Secondly, after deciding on the right thing to do, Rose took up that focus and went ahead to do it right. That’s the execution, implementation skill. And these two skills together can hardly be found in one person that’s why we have today in most companies a CEO and a COO.

Rose is a rare breed. She is strategic and at the same time knows how to make that strategy work and work well not only over the long term but immediately.

Strategic, effective

When she started, there were so many problems. So she diagnosed the problems with the end in view of determining which is the problem to attend to first and ahead of all others because solving it will impact many if not all of the other problems.

Rose came to identify this key problem as having to do with “customer service” and “customer satisfaction.”

She immediately went about identifying obvious areas of inefficiencies in the hospital operations.

For example, she saw that the queue for X-ray was near the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The X-ray equipment was in almost continuous use and so queuing of patients required by their doctors to have X-ray tended to easily build up.

In contrast, the MRI usage was by appointment. So Rose had the two separated. That resulted in a reduction of queuing time and freed a good number of medical personnel for other operations. That’s efficient and therefore satisfactory customer service.

Rose also had a simple time and motion study done on the arrival of patients and their handling by the hospital operations people.

For example, her study noted that acute cases required speedy doctor and nurse care. But the system of notifying doctors was via the old paging mechanism. That typically took time and the “long” wait agitated the suffering patients.

This was particularly true when several acute cases arrive all at the same time. Being familiar with the “dynamic line balancing system” in the banking industry, Rose had a buzzer installed around so that when the doctors and nurses concerned heard its sound, they were cued to come immediately to help patients. In the mid-’90s, Rose served as Citibank VP for branch banking and Citiphone banking, and before this, as head of service quality. That’s where she learned about the dynamic line balancing system.

For the hospital staff in direct client and patient contact, Rose asked HRD to develop and outsource training programs for quality and, more importantly, compassionate client service processing.

She also had the entire laboratory section where a real crowd builds up in the early morning enlarged and its “servicescapes” redesigned so that interactions among hospital medical and admin staff and patients take place in an atmosphere and ambiance of highly professional but caring standards.

Overall then, our prescription for your hospital if you want to do a Makati Med transformation is to look for and to hire a Rose Montenegro-like effective and efficient CEO-COO. If you can’t find these two skills in one person, then hire two, one an effective CEO and another, an efficient COO.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!