Programs & Projects

WDI’s Healthcare Initiative has collaborated since early 2018 with physicians in Michigan Medicine’s NIH-funded Ghana Emergency Medicine Collaborative (GEMC) to improve emergency department (ED) operations, finances and clinical delivery. The sites include 1,200-bed Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) and 2,200-bed Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) in Kumasi and Accra, respectively. MBA MAP teams have worked in each hospital in March-April 2018 (at KATH) and 2019 (at KBTH), with much recent work focusing on measuring the debilitating consequences of paper billing and payments (called “cash & carry”) that are presently made by patients exclusively in hard currency.

WDI has introduced simple tools at each hospital to track patient flows (e.g., a daily ED census), measure payments-related delays, seek to establish sustainable business processes and identify root causes of operational dysfunction. WDI has also recommended specific, step-wise actions at both hospitals that begin with offering patients a simple mobile payments option and thereafter proceed to digitize and restructure the entire revenue cycle (i.e., the process of generating a bill and collecting payment) and all of the surrounding clinical workflow. WDI is working with development officers from Michigan Medicine’s Emergency Medicine Department and GEMC to line up funding for further work. Several publications are being readied for submission to peer-reviewed journals (e.g., using census collected at KATH and KBTH) and two white papers are also near completion.