The Woodlands Hospital is a 193-bed hospital addition to the Houston Methodist Healthcare system located in The Woodlands area of North Houston.

Just months before the hospital was to open its doors to the community, the hospital team recognized the need to verify all the planning that had been done. They reached out to VWI to help them validate their operational plans and readiness status.

Over the next four months, VWI partnered with key members of the project management team to plan a series of workshops culminating in “Day in the Life” events.  A Day in the Life serves as a quality assurance validation and evaluation tool for the integration of operational planning, equipment and technology, policy and staff training. Participants walk through a typical day in the life of the hospital using carefully scripted scenarios designed to test every aspect of the organization.

VWI facilitated an Integration Workshop bringing together key senior and middle management staff with the goal of identifying services’ scope, specific operational processes, and matrixed touch points among all the services. Additional sessions held with the staff targeted equipment, technology systems, and processes for testing that fed into the development of scenarios.

Challenges in planning and executing the Integration and Day in the Life program included an already crowded events/meeting calendar, outfitting activities, blocked training schedules, and the concurrent Houston Methodist’s system electronic healthcare record implementation across four other facilities.

The Day in the Life events were highly successful involving staff from every section of the hospital. Benefits included greater staff awareness of the organization’s full capabilities, targets for expanded training, prioritization on remaining corrective actions, and management focus on planning gaps.

When the day came to open the doors, the staff was confident, knowledgeable, and trained to the high quality standards of Houston Methodist – and we helped them get there.