Medical device manufacturer achieves significant savings and revenue growth through Green Belt projects
After completing online Green Belt training, a series of Green Belt projects were launched in the summer of 2024. They had an in-house Black Belt mentor that worked directly with each project team. When the projects were near completion, the final presentations were provided to us for final review and approval for certification. Our role was to ensure the flow of the presentation (no gaps or missing information or logic), make sure the correct tools were used, and verify any statistical analysis performed. Every project needed some additional information before gaining approval, but 80-90% of the presentation was completed correctly.
Here are the projects completed during 2024 and early 2025:
- Reduced the turnaround time for new members receiving their supplies from 20 days to 14 days. The team identified methods to streamline the outbound system, provide field training for offices and developed a plan to monitor payer groups. These improvements resulted in revenue growth of over $400K, and there is potential to expand this to other product lines.
- Increased the number of enrolled pharmacies that are providing referrals for monitoring devices from 60% to 83%. The team prioritized the largest pharmacy chains and provided them with marketing handouts, SMS messaging services, and added alternative phone numbers to better reach patients. This resulted in over 2000 new members and over $3M in additional revenue.
- Reduced the manual labor to pull performance data from 18 hours a month to under 4 hours saving an estimated $8K per year. They accomplished it by reducing the number of process steps from 14 to 9 by consolidating the data into a SQL server.
- Reduced the collection of bad data from 6% over the previous year to 3%, which resulted in additional revenue of $250K after 3 months (expected $1M per year). It was accomplished by validating member demographic, insurance, and physician information during the initial enrollment. It also resulted in faster turnaround time and increased customer satisfaction.
- Increased the retention rate for new employees from 83% in the first 5 months of 2024 to 90% in the last 5 months, which resulted in anticipated benefits of nearly $1M in reduced hiring and onboarding. This was accomplished through improved onboarding process and procedures, mentoring program for new hires, and formal check-in points during the first 90 days.
- Reduced the average handling time for new patients from 15 minutes to under 12 minutes through simplification of the call scripts and reducing complexity for selecting insurance information. This led to increased customer satisfaction, and more capacity for handling new patient requests, which increased the number of sign ups, resulting in an additional $1.4M in revenue per year.
- Increased the % of past due collections from 34% to 72% by adding an automatic charging of credit cards and improving the reporting functionality and tracking for better visibility to unpaid invoices, which reduced the accounts receivable balance by $5M.
- Reduced call agent task usage by at least 67%, which frees up agents to respond to more customer calls, reducing waiting times, increase customer satisfaction and reducing abandoned call rates. This was accomplished by standardizing the methods and improving the training for agents. It resulted in cost savings of $200K per year.
- Reduced rejected documents from 21% to 15% (33% reduction) through better follow-up with physician offices and new checklists, which resulted in $1.2M in additional revenue.
- Increased patient collection rate from 60% to 78%, reducing payments outstanding balance by $4M. This was accomplished by creating enhanced reports showing outstanding patient balances and credit card payments that have been declined, and by setting up credit card autopay with patients.
- Reduced rejection rate from 7% to 3% on patient’s primary insurance information. This resulted in reduced internal rework and provided quicker and more efficient services to our members resulting in an estimated $1M in additional revenue each year. This was done by identifying the primary causes of the rejections, and ultimately upgrading the software verification tools, and by providing new training on the revised process to agents.
- Reduced the denied documents from 21% to 15%, resulting in $1.2M in additional revenue. They achieved the results by eliminating 5 wasteful steps, creating a prescriber call template, and installing a prescriber outreach team.
- Reduced data entry order error rates from 16% to 9% through software changes and new training for employees, resulting in 700 fewer hours of rework, which equates to over $30K in labor costs (soft savings).
If you’d like to have us help you with a similar program conducted virtually (where we provide the Master Black Belt support of the projects if you don’t have it), please check out our Lean Six Sigma Coaching Program for Organizations >>>
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