Delivering a new healthcare service is rarely straightforward. With rising demand, workforce shortages, and tight budgets, scaling a service effectively takes significant effort. This includes strategic thinking, collaboration, and a willingness to let go of “perfection” in pursuit of progress.
Mayden recently welcomed Abigail Downer, Proposition Delivery Manager at Acacium Group, to lead the next webinar in our operational challenges series, “Scaling Services Successfully: Optimising Productivity, Service Costs and Wait Times.”
By scaling services efficiently and collaboratively, you can:
- Avoid unnecessary stress for staff
- Deliver meaningful improvements faster
- Reduce waitlists whilst controlling costs
- Create a workplace culture that values innovation and learning
With practical strategies and examples, the session showcases how digital tools like iaptus can drive operational excellence by streamlining processes, enable data-driven decisions, reduce waitlists, control costs and enhance staff satisfaction and engagement.
You can watch the recording here.
Below, we outline 5 key strategies to help healthcare leaders scale their services successfully and sustainably, whilst keeping costs, timelines, and outcomes in check.
1. Start with the “why”
Before jumping straight into delivery, ask your stakeholders: Why are we launching this service?
Healthcare services are facing multifaceted and complex challenges, such as reducing waiting lists, workforce shortages, addressing health inequalities, and increasing access to mental health services to name a few.
Many services often fail to deliver value because they never clearly defined:
- The core problem they’re trying to solve
- The stakeholders’ real objectives
Too often, there can be a disconnect between the aim of the service and the problem it’s supposed to address (e.g. reduce waitlists, staff burnout, inefficient pathways). If you are able to align your stakeholders early in the process by getting a shared understanding of the “why”, this will keep everyone working in the same direction.
2. Don’t wait for perfection
While it’s tempting to launch a service that’s comprehensive and groundbreaking from day one, delaying delivery in search of perfection often means missed opportunities and prolonged impact.
“If you’ve delivered perfection, you’ve delivered it too late.” – Abigail Downer, Acacium Group
Instead, launch early, learn fast, iterate often.
Adopting an agile delivery method can help you get started with a viable version of your service. This allows you to test it in real settings, and build on it based on real-world feedback. This benefits both patients and the service in the long run; you can start helping patients much earlier, and learn areas of improvement or next developments based on how the service is actually running.
3. Demonstrate ROI
To sustain and grow your service, you will need to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). Taking an agile approach means building momentum with small wins while reducing risk, cost, and delays. It also helps make a compelling case for future investment and service evolution.
By reducing scope and getting to market faster, you start collecting data, improving patient outcomes, and creating value sooner. For example:
- Reducing waiting lists quicker means you’re solving a real problem earlier
- This, in turn, generates the evidence needed to secure buy-in for future development
Data gathered from a live service is far more powerful than predictions based on assumptions. By getting your service up and running sooner, you can collect data sooner, and share this with stakeholders to make informed decisions, which could not be done if the service is not yet live.
4. Build trust through communication
Getting buy-in from your key stakeholders is essential, especially when you might be proposing to go live with a service that is not yet perfect. However, with effective communication, you can win support from your stakeholders. Here are some ways in which you may be able to do this:
- Communicate transparently and frequently, so everyone knows the progress being made with launching the new service.
- Ask tough questions early: “Do we really want to delay launch of the service for this specific feature?”
- Explain the risks of delay in terms of lost impact, delayed outcomes, and missed learning opportunities.
Strong communication builds trust, and trust can be one of your biggest assets when managing change. This may also help to change the mindset of stakeholders who may perhaps be a bit wary, and help demonstrate the value of helping patients sooner, and gathering data that can enhance the service in time.
5. Choose your partners wisely and collaborate effectively
Expanding or starting a healthcare service is never a solo mission. Whether you are partnering with digital suppliers, coordinating with other service providers, or working across various internal teams, collaboration is the key to success. When it comes to selecting partners:
- Choose partners who align with your values and have a strong understanding of healthcare delivery.
- Respect and embrace diverse expertise. From technical to clinical, everyone brings something different and valuable which can contribute to the future success of your service.
- Create space for input from clinicians, operations, digital teams, and even patients. Their perspectives are invaluable.
Adopting a collaborative mindset not only leads to better service design but also accelerates implementation and builds long-term resilience into your processes.
This extends to supporting your staff, and keeping their welfare at the forefront. Healthcare professionals are often already stretched thinly. Poor service delivery processes will only add to burnout and create workforce instability. Sustainable service delivery is not only good for patients, but it can play a huge role in improving staff retention.
iaptus can help reduce waitlists
iaptus is designed to support services in growing effectively, with flexible tools and features that grow with your needs, freeing up valuable clinical and administrative time, so you can support more people in your care. Book a demo.
Tackling operational challenges in your healthcare service?
Hear from more experts in the series here.
