The Camden Group uses a variety of custom tools, including analytic, retreat facilitation, and assessment tools to help our clients achieve success. This tool kit supports our analyses with the appropriate balance of rigor and pace to help our clients reach decisions quickly and yet assure organizational buy-in.

Camden's IQ Tests

What's your organization's Improvement Quotient? At The Camden Group, our proprietary IQ Tests help determine whether an organization is meeting optimal standards or if there are areas that need improvement. Based on an organization's score, we can efficiently identify where management should focus their resources and implement practical and effective solutions to the challenges our clients face.

The following are a few types of IQ Tests that we frequently use to help our clients:

Governance

• This assessment identifies board process improvement opportunities, strengths, and critical success factors. It is designed to build rapid alignment among board members and prioritize focus.

Care Management

• This assessment identifies the barriers to achieving optimal patient throughput and care effectiveness in the hospital. The results can provide significant opportunities for improving financial performance and reducing capacity constraints, not to mention improvements in patient safety and quality outcomes

Clinical Service Line

• Our Clinical Service Line IQ Evaluation is a key component of our service line planning services. Each test helps create a unique profile of a client's service line based on 14 key characteristics. We then compare an individual provider's profile against the characteristics of strong regional centers of excellence to reveal opportunities for differentiation, "strengths" to be leveraged, and "gaps" that must be resolved. We have specialized tests for numerous service lines, including:
  • Cardiology
  • Oncology
  • Neurology
  • Orthopedics
  • Women and Children's

Physician Alignment

• This assessment measures and scores the effectiveness of an organization's hospital-physician alignment strategy and identifies ways to strengthen integration strategies. This can include the current state of hospital-physician relationships, the performance of hospital-owned practices, development and engagement of physician leadership, and alignment on key initiatives such as quality improvement, service line growth, and cost reduction.

Clinical Integration

• Our Clinical Integration IQ Test evaluates an organization's current clinical integration efforts to determine readiness for meeting regulatory (FTC) or payer expectations for tracking clinical performance across the care continuum. It can also be used to evaluate readiness for global payment, "bundling," and other emerging reimbursement structures.

Planning Tools:

Camden's DecisionPoint

• Collectively, this set of interactive modeling tools assists healthcare organizations make crucial decisions about strategies to grow, add or eliminate services and facilities, or simply to refine strategic and financial plans. It combines rigorous inputs and relationships with the simplicity of outcomes and ease of use. This assures that planning processes are based on objective analysis that includes opportunity to review multiple scenarios without prolonging the process
• Camden's DecisionPoint includes the following tools:
  • Market Impact
  • Volume Projector
  • Facility Planner
  • Financial DecisionPoint

Value-Driven Strategy Prioritization Tool

• This tool guides clients in prioritizing various strategies based on the value composite of the principle drivers of value - clinical outcomes, competitive pricing, and patient satisfaction.

Physician Needs Calculator

Our Physician Needs Calculator is based on our proprietary physician-to-population ratios and provides immediate and accurate objective analyses to determine physician needs in a given market. We can provide the inputs - entering population profiles and inventories of physicians in the organization's defined service area - and our Physician Needs Calculator produces immediate reports that can substantiate recruitment plans that meet regulatory guidelines.

Retreat Facilitation Tools

Our leadership team is highly experienced in facilitating retreats and critical decision-making sessions to guide groups towards a focused action plan. We are skilled in using a variety of tools including the computer-based decision management tool, OptionFinder®. Our experts know how to plan the right exercises, design the proper questions, and accurately interpret your results and input to effectively move the decision-making process and assure buy-in from all participants.

The following are a sample of the tools and exercises we use to facilitate retreats:

Vision By Design^SM

• Utilizing our proprietary Vision by Design^SM process, participants identify the characteristics of their organization in a highly successful state at a date 10-20 years into the future. This provides an interactive, engaging means of identifying the organization's distinctive competitive position, scope of services, relationships with other providers, use of technology, and markets served.

OptionFinder®

• The Camden Group uses the OptionFinder® System to better focus and leverage the value of the input received during board retreats and other critical decision-making sessions. The OptionFinder® System is a computer-based decision management tool which can bring ideas and opinions of a group of people into a focused plan of action within a very short time period. Incorporating the speed and anonymity offered by computers, this tool helps reduce or eliminate the downside of group dynamics while strengthening the positive results of creative group thinking. Participants are more candid, no one person dominates the discussion, and everyone has equal input. Our facilitators are skilled at optimizing the use of this tool whether we provide it or the client owns it.

Competitor Role Play

• Through this exercise, participants develop an understanding of their organization's vulnerabilities, identify corrective actions for those weaknesses, and prepare for and/or co-opt the expected actions of the competition.

Culture and Values Trade-off Assessment

• Our retreat facilitators use this interactive exercise to work with participants to identify and prioritize the issues that need to be addressed based on the culture of the organization and the values that are most important to the participants. The exercise uses individual assessment of organizational practices and behaviors combined with small task group discussions to align perceptions of "what is" with "what should be." The entire group is then in a position to proactively identify ways to align practices with principles and change the organization's culture to be consistent with commonly held ideals.