The Medtronic Integrated Health Solutions Team Addresses the Quadruple Aim
Morteza Zohrabi (MD) helps organizations improve outcomes, and maximise efficiencies.
Morteza Zohrabi has built a career helping hospitals and healthcare organizations cut through complex problems that bog down efficiency, waste already strained resources, and create roadblocks to patients accessing care in a timely manner.
As lead consultant with the Medtronic Integrated Health Solutions (IHS) team, Morteza can point to numerous case studies (available at medtronic.ca/IHS) where he and his colleagues have worked with healthcare providers across the country to unclog bottlenecks, reduce wait times and improve the healthcare provider experience.
Morteza Zohrabi and Medtronic Canada President Neil D. Fraser
"We stay on to help ensure implementation. We see ourselves as partners in healthcare and partners in solutions."
But his greatest sense of pride comes from the statistics and data that show the process improvements are paying off with better patient care.
“In healthcare, everyone is doing their best to provide the best care for patients,” he says. “However, there are many system-related issues that need to be analyzed and improved. Our IHS team works very closely with healthcare professionals and administration to make their efforts more fruitful and lead to improved outcomes.”
Morteza, who received his medical degree in his native Iran in 2000, is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Back Belt and also has his Certified Return on Investment Professional designation.
Since moving to Canada in 2006, he has led and implemented many system evaluation and process optimization projects for numerous private and public sector organizations, including healthcare facilities.Among these projects, he led a team of more than 30 directors, senior managers and senior analysts who undertook a Lean review of the Ministry of Community and Social Services transfer payment process, identifying ways to streamline and simplify it. He was later recognized with a Deputy Minister's Bravo Award for Innovation and Creativity in 2013.
Since Medtronic launched its IHS team six years ago, Morteza has been helping hospitals and healthcare organizations identify, understand, and control their costs, while optimizing efficiencies to enhance the patient and healthcare provider experience.
“We use our analysis of operational data to help hospitals understand how their systems are working and how they can better manage their day-to-day operations,” he says. “Our job is to train, facilitate, and coach the professionals. All the ideas are coming from the staff, the clinicians and the managers themselves; however, our role is to coach them and see things within the process that they might have missed and analyze what’s creating the bottlenecks.”
It’s an approach that has paid off with significant gains for the team’s clients. Morteza attributes that success to the fact that the IHS team doesn’t simply complete a review and hand over a report with recommendations to administrators and clinicians. “We stay on to ensure implementation. We help make things happen. We see ourselves as partners in healthcare and partners in solutions.”