CPSI builds a ‘Dream Factory,’ and gets results from its employees and clients

CPSI encourages its employees to dream – and dream big.

CPSI is an electronic health record and financial health IT vendor. It offers business, consulting and managed IT services, including a suite of revenue cycle management products designed to help streamline day-to-day revenue functions and enhance productivity.

The company’s patient engagement technology is designed to provide patients and providers with the information and tools they need to share existing clinical data and analytics that support value-based care, improve outcomes and increase patient satisfaction.

In 2022, CPSI launched a program called the Dream Factory, a company-wide think-tank to rapidly bring to market customer feature requests and employee ideas for improvement. The program was spearheaded by CPSI’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Wes Cronkite.

Seventy-eight employees spread across 19 self-formed teams developed unique projects and innovative ideas to enhance CPSI’s current technology and processes. Topics included AI, machine learning, revenue generation and cost savings. While ideas were original, they included client feedback. This opportunity ignited excitement among employees to propose something completely new and impactful.

We interviewed Cronkite to get an in-depth look into the Dream Factory so other health IT vendors and even provider organization IT departments could learn from CPSI’s experience.

Q. Please explain what the Dream Factory is, its goals, and who is involved.

A. The story of the Dream Factory began at our National Client Conference in May 2022 in St. Louis. Under the principle that innovation cannot be achieved in a vacuum and customers need to be brought into the process early, our initial goal was to open a door for customers to bring their big ideas and wish lists.

We set up a station at the user group for customers to discuss these ideas and enter them into a portal for voting. The top voted idea would result in a take-home prize for the customer who entered it. We intentionally named this approach of taking customers’ ideas (dreams) and converting them to tangible solutions (factory) the Dream Factory.

To get the innovation factory running, we then challenged our entire organization to deliver solutions surrounding customer ideas using an agile approach where the solutions would be delivered within a month’s time. That was the only guidance we gave our teams. From there, they self-organized and spent the next month working on their solutions.

Our goal was to prove to ourselves (and to our customers) that even in the heavily regulated environment of healthcare services and technology, we could deliver directly what our customers needed – and do it in a timely way.

The Dream Factory set the stage for an organizational transformation at CPSI. Teams aligned into new scaled agile operating models and delivered more than 30 solutions as a part of the month-long challenge.

Q. 78 employees spread across 19 self-formed teams developed unique projects and ideas to enhance your company’s current technology and processes. Please elaborate on how this worked and what came out of it.

A. In 2023 we decided to again challenge our employees. But this time we knew our customers and employees needed something a bit different. With the public release of ChatGPT’s generative AI solutions and new internal technological capabilities, we evolved the Dream Factory challenge into a “Big Idea” event for 2023.

We asked our employees to produce concepts including a full business and implementation plan for delivering value to our customers through nascent technologies. The operating model for the Big Idea challenge was basically the same as the Dream Factory whereby self-managed teams present their solutions to a judging panel and a winner is selected.

The powerful element added in 2023 was to turn the Big Idea into a “factory” to be built and delivered in 2024. The winning team was also able to tap into CPSI’s commitment to career mobility and upskilling as part of the solution.

Nineteen teams presented very well-thought-out big ideas benefitting CPSI customers, our company and healthcare delivery at large. The winning team produced a detailed idea and implementation plan to feed the copious amount of support ticketing data and our existing product documentation into a generative AI model.

The resulting solution provides a chat interface for our support representatives to help customers with product issues. In the next phase, the same solution will interact directly with customers to improve the support experience and drive better utilization of our products.

Q. Please offer one example of a successful new tool that emanated from the Dream Factory and is in place in your technology offerings today. How did it develop and what are provider organizations doing with it today?

A. Many solutions originating from the initial Dream Factory challenge in 2022 made their way to CPSI’s products and services. However, one standout moved the downstream process of quality measures reporting further upstream in the care cycle by integrating alerts and insights directly at the point of care within our EHR.

Now clinicians and ancillary staff are immediately aware of areas that may likely cause a negative impact on quality measures. Proactive actions can be taken from the start instead of waiting for retrospective quality performance reports.

Our customers came along for the journey and ultimately this one standout tool led to additional workflow enhancements for nurses, enabling them to deliver more efficient, high-quality care.

Q. What advice would you offer your peers at other HIT vendor organizations who would like to do something similar?

A. My advice would be that if you are feeling defeated or overwhelmed with driving innovation, consider taking some of the approaches that made CPSI’s Dream Factory a success:

Bring both employees and customers into the process early.
Use Agile methods to ensure a rapid path to value delivery.
Incent employees both with compensation and with career mobility and progression to partake in events.
Make it fun. Take the corporate sports jacket off for a little while and put on an innovation cowboy hat.
Celebrate the victory.