CPSI is building a ‘Dream Factory’ and achieving results for its employees and customers

CPSI encourages its employees to dream – and dream big.

CPSI is an IT provider for electronic health records and financial healthcare. It provides business, consulting and managed IT services, including a range of revenue cycle management products designed to streamline day-to-day revenue functions and improve productivity.

The company’s patient engagement technology is designed to provide patients and caregivers 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 quickly bring customer feature requests and employee improvement ideas to market. The program was led by Wes Cronkite, CPSI’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer.

Seventy-eight employees, spread across 19 self-formed teams, developed unique projects and innovative ideas to improve CPSI’s current technology and processes. Topics included AI, machine learning, monetization and cost savings. While the ideas were original, they also incorporated customer feedback. This opportunity created enthusiasm among employees to propose something completely new and impactful.

We interviewed Cronkite to gain in-depth insight into the Dream Factory so that other healthcare IT vendors and even service provider IT departments could learn from CPSI’s experiences.

Q. Explain what the Dream Factory is, what its objectives are and who is involved.

A. The Dream Factory story began at our National Customer Conference in May 2022 in St. Louis. Based on the principle that innovation cannot be achieved in a vacuum and that customers must be involved early in the process, our original 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 where customers could 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 participated. We have deliberately called this approach in which we convert customers’ ideas (dreams) into tangible solutions (factory-based) the Dream Factory.

To get the innovation factory up and running, we then challenged our entire organization to deliver solutions around customer ideas using an agile approach, delivering solutions within a month. That was the only guidance we gave our teams. From there, they organized themselves and spent the next month working on their solutions.

Our goal was to prove to ourselves (and to our customers) that even in the highly regulated environment of healthcare services and technology, we could deliver what our customers needed immediately – and on time.

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

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

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

We asked our employees to develop concepts including a complete business and implementation plan for delivering value to our customers through emerging technologies. The operating model for the Big Idea Challenge was basically the same as the Dream Factory, where self-managing teams present their solutions to a jury and a winner is selected.

The powerful element added in 2023 was to turn the Big Idea into a ‘factory’ that would be built and delivered in 2024. The winning team also benefited from CPSI’s commitment to career mobility and upskilling as part of the solution.

Nineteen teams presented very well thought out big ideas that would benefit CPSI clients, our company, and healthcare at large. The winning team produced a detailed idea and implementation plan to process the large 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 assist customers with product issues. In the next phase, the same solution will communicate directly with customers to improve the support experience and drive better use of our products.

Q. Please give one example of a successful new tool that emerged from the Dream Factory and is in your technology offering today. How has it developed and what are provider organizations doing with it today?

A. Many solutions that emerged from the original 2022 Dream Factory challenge found their way into CPSI’s products and services. However, one highlight has moved the downstream process of reporting quality measures further upstream in the care cycle by integrating alerts and insights directly into our EHR at the point of care.

Now physicians and support staff are immediately aware of the areas that are likely to have a negative impact on quality measures. Proactive actions can be taken from the start rather than waiting for retroactive performance reports.

Our customers joined us, and ultimately this one standout tool led to additional workflow improvements for nurses, helping them deliver high-quality care more efficiently.

Q. What advice would you give to your colleagues at other HIT vendor organizations who might want to do something similar?

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

1. Involve both employees and customers in the process at an early stage.

2. Use Agile methods to ensure a fast path to value delivery.

3. Incentivize employees to participate in events with both compensation and career mobility and progression.

4. Make it fun. Take off the company sports jacket and put on an innovative cowboy hat.

5. Celebrate the victory.

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