Overview
The largest commercial HMO in New York, Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of Greater New York, set out to fix its ailing claims turnaround time--which had deteriorated from about 1.5 days to eight days after co-locating its scanning operations in the same building as the mailroom. Even though the two functions became physically co-located, the process suffered delays. After forming an improvement team, and conducting a Value Stream analysis, HIP was able to shorten claims processing time from the extended eight days to just three hours--a dramatic improvement over and above the original turnaround time of 1.5 days.