Medical
A Six Sigma Success Story
Gratiot Medical Center
by Tim Broadwell
The Six Sigma management strategy has helped many companies enhance their business models and compete more effectively in the modern world. One of the most interesting of these Six Sigma success stories is that of Gratiot Medical Center, a medical provider serving the central Michigan region. With a 
staff of more than 1300 employees and another 250 volunteers, Gratiot has been serving the central Michigan region since 1955, and its experience with Six Sigma has been a very positive one.
In addition to traditional medical services, Gratiot Medical Center also serves the community with home health care, hospice care, radiology, cardiac care, an urgent care center and rehabilitation services. Like so many other health care providers, Gratiot Medical Center had been facing growing challenges. One of he most significant of these challenges involved repeated billing denials, and the company has used Six Sigma techniques to overcome these challenges and provide more effective patient care for the community.
In June of 2005 Gratiot Medical Center became one of five hospitals to participate in the implementation of the MMTC Lean/Six Sigma program. The ambitious goals for this pilot program included the implementation of the same process improvements that had been successfully implemented by other firms taking place in the Six Sigma process.
The training of the Black Belts and Green Belts of the Lean/Six Sigma process started soon after in August of 2005, and the project itself started in November of the same year. A big part of the Six Sigma process is learning about the factors that are negatively impacting the business, and that process was an important, and eye opening, one for the staff of the Gratiot Medical Center in central Michigan. Those selected to be the Black Belts and Green Belts for the process would learn how to identify the things that were holding them back and preventing them from getting the outcomes they wanted. The Six Sigma process also gave company personnel a way to quantify the exact variables that were having the biggest impact and causing the biggest problems.
The Six Sigma process also gave the decision makers at Gratiot Medical Center the opportunity to measure how they were doing and how the processes the put in place were working to make the business better and more efficient. During the course of the process implementation staff members learned how to apply the lessons of the Lean/Six Sigma management style to the specific needs of the health care environment.
For Gratiot Medical Center the focus of the Six Sigma project was a reduction in the number of billing errors and claim denials due to missing ABN numbers. Gratiot Medical Center was suffering substantial revenue loss as a result of these errors, many of them stemming from inconsistent authorization procedures and registration techniques. As a result the Six Sigma team focused on identifying the problems with the billing process by looking at critical business processes and identifying each point of failure.
Those in charge of the Six Sigma process had to create and implement new ways to measure the problem and recognize the source of the denials. This had been attempted before, but those earlier efforts had always come up short. But by the time the Six Sigma project came to an end in February of 2006, Gratiot Medical Center had already seen many positive impacts from its participation in the program.
One of the most significant improvements was an increased focus on cooperation with doctors. During the course of the Six Sigma program, staff from Gratiot Medical Center created a training program for physicians and traveled to their offices to give those physicians a thorough understanding of the billing needs of the medical center. Through the Six Sigma program the Gratiot Medical Center was able to identify where more education was needed, and they were able to provide that education to their 
physician partners. The medical center found that the physicians and their office personnel were very receptive to the training program, and all involved have used what they have learned to improve patient care, data collection and billing practices.
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