12.02.2022
Inova Healthcare System Saves Cost, Gains Efficiencies, and Achieves Scalability with Optify’s Coaching Platform
Inova is Northern Virginia’s leading nonprofit healthcare provider, employing more than 18,000 team members and serving more than 2 million individuals annually through an integrated network of hospitals, primary and specialty care practices, emergency, and urgent care centers, outpatient services, and destination institutes.
“I don’t wait for others to ask me why I work with Optify, I ask them why they aren’t working with Optify – it’s truly been a game changer.”
Sharon Blackborrow,
VP Learning, Talent, & Organizational Effectiveness,
Inova Health System
Highlights
Challenges
- Tracking internal coaching efforts was done 100% manually; zero visibility into external engagements
- Taxed with sourcing all follow-up material for coaching engagements
- No good way to measure impact or delineate coaching programs/types of coaching
- Scaling or expanding coaching programs meant losing visibility altogether
Solutions
Optify.io Coaching Management Platform provided Inova with:
- Push-button reporting to give immediate visibility into the volume, effectiveness, and overall impact of coaching programs
- Structure and functionality to help coaches stay organized and keep engagements on track
- Internal resource library that allows the coaches – often swamped with outside responsibilities or large coaching rosters – to enhance and amplify the coaching engagement effortlessly
- Collective management functionality and cross-program tracking to allow Inova’s coaching
Results
- Ability to report across more than a dozen coaches and their 50+ engagements each in minutes
- At-the-ready Insight and data to provide visibility and proof of coaching program effectiveness and meaningfulness
- Ability to now scale and expand coaching initiatives without loss of visibility
- The resulting increase in bandwidth from the efficiencies gained from Optify’s platform allowed Inova to fully centralize their coaching program without adding additional FTEs
Challenges
Over-taxed with manual processes and tracking that limited scaling and growing coaching programs.
Inova Healthcare System is sizable, employing more than 18,000 team members and serving more than 2 million individuals each year across its vast network of hospitals, practices, centers, institutes, and services. Despite its size, the not-for-profit Inova had a limited team to oversee the volume of coaching initiatives at Inova. And laborious manual processes and the creation of coaching program follow-up material taxed the Inova team and hindered their ability to scale Inova’s coaching programs. To grow and expand their coaching program required them to lose the limited visibility they had of their internal coaching programs through their entirely manual program tracking. This challenge was compounded by the heavy rosters of the internal Inova coaches – an average of 50 clients per coach across individuals and teams. The team had no visibility into external engagements.
“Prior to having Optify in place, we were manually tracking our coaching efforts, sourcing all follow-up material, zero visibility into external engagements, and we had no way of expanding our coaching program without ‘letting go’ of visibility.”
Inova was at a precipice driven by volume and a need for the ability to scale its coaching programs; to evolve them and match the maturity and needs of the large Virginia healthcare provider.
“We’ll always be a small team that will never have the luxury of a program manager so we needed a lightweight tool that could allow us to flex as our program continues to evolve and mature, accounting for both internal and external engagements.”
With a cavalry of coaches carrying enormous rosters and competing responsibilities, Inova needed a platform that could provide organization at both the individual coach level and across a vast number of coaching engagements both internally and from outside of Inova. Inova needed a platform that would allow it to scale and mature its coaching programs. It needed visibility into them that it just wasn’t achieving through its current manual tracking. It needed data to support the coaching programs’ effectiveness. And it needed it to do this at a reasonable price point.
Solutions
Optify platform provides structured flexibility, organizational and individual line-of-sight to Inova’s coaching initiatives.
Inova found Optify an easy choice. In addition to the functionality and cost effectiveness, Inova found that onboarding the Optify platform was relatively easy and quickly learned of partnerships Optify had with other leadership development providers that Inova already used.
“Optify was an easy choice for Inova. It’s a high power solution with a low barrier to entry at a reasonable price point. As a not-for-profit organization, we are always needing to find solutions that are both useful and cost effective; Optify really hits that mark.”
Inova began to take advantage of the platform’s capabilities right away, working within the customizable interface to easily brand it for the company. The team enjoyed the additional capabilities Optify provided such as coach selection and built-in assessments, as well as the Optify platform’s Resource Library which provided Inova coaches with at-the-ready resources and tools to use in coaching engagements.
“Our internal coaches either hold exceptionally high coaching rosters (i.e.50 clients across individuals and teams) or they are leaders with large roles that coach “on the side” so not only does Optify keep our coaches organized with notes, agendas, etc., [Optify’s Resource Library] allows them to enhance and amplify the coaching engagement effortlessly!”
But the Optify platform’s dashboards and reporting functionality were particularly important to relieve the team of the previously cumbersome manual tracking and provide line-of-sight across all coaches, coaching engagements (both internal and external) at the push of a button.
Results
Inova saves cost, gains efficiencies, and achieves scalability with Optify’s Coaching Management Platform.
“In minutes we’re able to report out the volume and efficacy of our coaching programs – this is something that was nearly impossible before Optify.”
The increased bandwidth and efficiencies gained from using the Optify platform made it possible for the Inova team to fully centralize their coaching program, including external engagements, without adding any additional FTEs.
“Our coaching program at Inova has always been fabulous – meaningful and effective – with Optify, we now have the data and insight to prove that over and over again!”
Inova is now able to scale and expand its coaching initiatives with no loss of visibility, and prove the value and effectiveness of its coaching engagement with easily accessible and clearly organized data and reporting.
