“The Best Value Analysis Teams Work Hard To Find Innovative And
Groundbreaking Solutions To Their Cost And Quality Challenges By
Asking Good Quality Questions”
Our industry is all abuzz
with the advent of the new coated coronary stent that prevents scar
tissue from building up over a stent and reblocking arteries, but
did you know that value analysis played an important role in
inventing this new innovative product?
It all
started when the co-inventor of the coronary coated stent Dr.
William Hunter started asking good quality questions like,
“why doesn’t anyone add low doses of drugs to medical devices to
improve their performance?” After some research he found the
reason was that drug companies and medical device companies really
weren’t talking to each other because they had different product
life cycles.
Dr. William
then found a young cardiologist, Lindsay Machan, who had the same
interest in adding drugs to medical devices he used for his
patients to improve their outcomes and they quickly formed a
partnership to find a better coronary stent.
However,
before Drs. William and Machan made a breakthrough in making a
better stent they had to ask more good quality questions to
understand why the failure rate on traditional non-coated stents was
20% or more. They asked, “what does the body do to these stents
and why do they fail”. This is when Drs. William and Machan
learned about the scar-tissue problem, because no one else
was asking this question. After two years of experimentation and
seven years of clinical trials this team found the drug
paclitaxel which was also used for treating tumors to
prevent the growth of scar tissue. The rest of the story is now
history!
Now, what
does the invention of the coated coronary stent have in common with
value analysis?
Value Analysis Is All About “Asking Good Quality Questions”
Whether Drs. William and Machan
knew it or not when they were inventing the coated coronary stent
they were applying one of the most powerful techniques in
value analysis, “asking good quality questions”. In fact,
Dr. William has found through his research that asking risky
questions will get you dramatically new answers. Isn’t that’s
what value analysis is all about?
Yet the tendency today is to ask
poor questions, safe questions or no questions
at all. Value analysis practitioners often believe what their
customers, stakeholders and experts tell them (we just looked at
this product line and found no savings, or, our benchmarks say we
are in good shape) about the product, service or technology
under investigation. If you take risks by “asking good quality
questions”, this will enable you to flush out the truth
about the product, service or technology’s wasteful or inefficient
methods and practices that are proliferate in all categories of your
purchases.
If you are to be truly
innovative in value analysis or any other scientific process you
must take risks and “celebrate failures” is what Dr. William’s
believes and practices. He tells us further that, “If you send the
message that the only road to…success is experiments that work,
people won’t ask risky questions or get any dramatically new
answers”.
Value Analysis Is A “Risky Business”
It was once
said by James B. Conant that if we are looking for the rewards of
risk we should be like a turtle. “He only makes progress when
he sticks his neck out”.
Like the
turtle, the reward of risk for value analysis practitioners is
finding breakthrough savings and quality gains for your healthcare
organization by asking good quality questions, so you can
“…come at problems (and challenges) from an angle that is 90-degrees
different from everyone else” to quote Drs. William on his
experience on how to jump start innovation at any organization.
Yes, value
analysis is a “risky business”, but also a rewarding business
for value analysis practitioners who want to excel in the art
and science of value analysis.
by
Robert T. Yokl, President