Making patients happy

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I came to McKinsey Implementation after three years as a general surgery resident. Though I enjoyed practicing medicine and patient care, I wanted to make changes to healthcare on a larger scale. Since joining McKinsey, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects that enable hospitals to provide higher quality care to a greater number of patients, which is exactly the kind of impact that I was looking for during residency. I can still leverage my clinical background, though, to work closely with both clinicians and hospital administrators, and I especially enjoy coaching doctors and nurses.

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One example of a recent project: helping the clinical staff at an academic medical center improve patient experience and surgery scheduling. We worked side–by–side with nurses, anesthesiologists, and surgeons to identify pain points in the patient journey and developed solutions to improve patient experience. For example, patients understandably did not appreciate having to get to the hospital 2+ hours before their operation was scheduled, so the clinical staff worked with the finance and insurance departments to streamline pre–surgery paperwork and testing, thereby reducing the amount of time patients had to spend at the hospital the morning of their operation. We also increased operating room utilization by 10%, enabling the hospital to perform 2,000 more operations every year than they were currently performing, thereby increasing the number of patients they are able to serve. By creating a standardized checklist for each operation type, they improved the case duration accuracy of these operations based on patient factors, reducing unused operating room time as well as delays from cases running longer than expected.

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