Dan Niemiec

Designed and Led Improvement Strategy

• Developed strategy and structure for an Operational Excellence system across the Network of 10 hospitals and 17 institutes.
• Fostered productive relationships with each hospital’s C-Suite team, focused on operational excellence and cultural change development efforts, learning, and future steps.
• Led and guided a team of 8 OE Coaches to implement the OE System, within the hospital they were supporting, focused on cultural adaptation, unique process needs, harvesting of best ideas, and relationship building with all mid-senior leadership.
• Developed collaborative relationships with other functional areas within corporate (Quality & Safety, Patient Experience, Nursing Ops & Education, Talent & Engagement, Finance Analytics) focused on one improvement model.
• Opened channels of communication with improvement leaders at Highmark Health and established relationship and regular coordination with ThinkUp’s AHN Account Director for improvement overlaps and partnership.

Performance Management

• Created and distributed performance scorecards to hospital and institute C-Suite teams for monthly operating reviews, containing aligned metrics from 12functional SMEs, consistent visualized targets across 10 hospitals, and action plans.
• Facilitated the practical linkage between network level scorecards (60+ aligned metrics) to hospital C-Suite level scoreboards (15-20 visualized focused metrics), purposeful areas for improvement, and subsequent action plans.

Direct Improvement Facilitation

• Analyzed supply utilization across 4 hospital labor & delivery units to compare average cost per c-section before and after engaging physician leaders and guiding them to educate to a new standard protocol.
• Facilitated solving problems for revenue cycle denials management, to reduce final denial write offs, starting with interventional cardiology and high cost drugs, before allowing team to model the improvement process.
• Visualized daily Length of Stay (LOS) metrics for team of hospitalists at West Penn Hospital to review and update actions, resulting in the 5month swing of $1.2m and a positive $600k realized.
• Guided the OE’s involvement in Patient Throughput and Early Discharge improvement initiatives across the hospitals, resulting in increased patients discharged by 11am, number of physicians engaged with their performance metrics, and turn around time analysis of all orders in patients 24hrs prior to discharge, to identify delays and ancillary opportunities.
• Interim OE Coach for Jefferson and Canonsburg Hospitals, facilitating an all manager morning huddle with 100+ leaders while building huddle leader capabilities in 10+ rotating leaders.

COVID Healthcare Operations

• Co-led AHN’s Covid Command Center at the pandemic onset, organizing and facilitating 14 diverse workstreams organizing and aligning all cross-functional efforts in a high priority approach, integration of real time surge planning for operational readiness, and lead the development and standardization of daily covid reporting across multifunctional areas of the organization.
• Program Managed AHN’s Vaccine Deployment, resulting in 450,000+ patient vaccinations, 80+ mass and large community clinics, 3450+ unique employees volunteers
• Interpreted incoming information from federal, state, and local government and health agencies, to plan the standard process and patient flow, applied to 10 hospitals and their hospital based vaccine clinics, setup and supplies needed, and staffing ratios per capacity, leading to the vaccination of 14,000+ AHN employees and 200,000+ public patient vaccinations.
• Main AHN point of contact for exploring and stewarding supportive relationships with vaccine clinic partners, site owners, community leaders, and sponsors. Coordinated the planning, operations, logistics, and event leadership at major mass clinic sites (stadiums, corporate facilities, convention centers, a vacant mall, high school and college campuses, an airport, a jail, churches, etc.) to seamlessly run vaccination clinics.
• Obtain legal agreements, regulatory approval, IS readiness, IT network setup, hardware, and devices, standard process layout for patient flow, supply and marketing receiving, and logistics for increasing amount of supplies and materials needed for a high quality patient experience.
• Developed and facilitated pre-mass clinic training for all internal stakeholders 1 day prior to volunteering at mass clinics (100+ attendees per clinic).
• Led the partnership with 35 members of the Army National Guard’s support at 3 mass clinic days for vaccinator and patient flow support.
• Supported the coordination with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leaders for clinics in underserved communities.
• Deployed and led OE Team members to monitor, triage, and respond to all communication in the CovidVaccine@AHN.org inbox in nearly real time.

• Lead OE Coach for West Penn Hospital, support OE coach for Jefferson Regional Hospital, focused on facilitating cross-functional improvement projects and coaching the development of huddle boards, problem solving, and lean tools.
• Facilitated the OE Team development of the Operational Excellence Roadmap for each facility’s implementation.
• Facilitated the OE Team development and standardization of the 7 Step Improvement Project Process.
• Developed leadership education focused on individual improvement projects sustained using operational excellence management system tools.
• For the Level of Care Determination sub-team of the Controllable Loss project, aiming to improve the accuracy of information sent and reduce the amount of cases unnecessarily sent to physician advisors.

• Consulted with 6 healthcare and manufacturing internal continuous improvement teams in the deployment and use of the operational excellence systems for cultural change and process improvement.
• Coached internal continuous improvement leaders in diverse healthcare pilot halls, such as an out-patient physician practice, bariatric care service line, financial revenue cycle, and radiology services to advance the lean system.
• Led the startup of an administrative pilot hall for the operational excellence system in the revenue cycle and patient financial services departments within the finance division, focused on decreasing denials & improving clean claims.
• Coached an internal continuous improvement leader in the deployment of an operational excellence system at a healthcare home health ‘customer’ organization focused on patient transition of care management, resulting in 33% decrease in total readmissions and 24% decrease in agency OT from 2016 to Jul-2017.
• Designed an operational excellence training strategy for a 2500+ employee healthcare organization, focused on lean system educational content, experiential education for leaders, and on-the-job qualifications for both leaders and team members.
• Led the development of 22 online educational training modules for a healthcare client, including the creation of storyboards, scripts, videos, voiceovers, interactions, and quizzes in SCORM compliant packages decreasing classroom training by 4 hours for 2200 front line employees.
• Co-facilitated a modified value stream mapping / process redesign improvement event for global supply chain improvement initiative, which standardized the method & process for internal ordering and aimed to improve first promise date delivery.
• Taught two seminars in the Masters of Management: Operational Excellence program at St. Vincent College each semester.

• Designed the deployment plan for the operational excellence system in a 600+ employee manufacturing organization.
• Co-designed an improvement operating system with the internal continuous improvement team for a global manufacturer based on a value stream mapping improvement event and a daily management system for sustainment.
• Facilitated a series of value stream mapping improvement events for a global manufacturer: alpha test of the improvement system within a lean manufacturing cell, beta test of the improvement system in which the process standard was deployed across South American operations, and a beta test of the improvement system with a corporate capital budgeting process.
• Provided “coach-the-coach” development to prepare internal continuous improvement leaders for the implementation and sustainment of the management system, in its global organization-wide deployment.
• Trained 20+ manufacturing, healthcare and service organizations in operational excellence and lean manufacturing topics.
• Organized, coordinated and managed the KCOE Institute for Operational Excellence, which included an annual conference and training events held at Saint Vincent College and the Online Institute membership community.
• Led the KCOE Cooperative Intern Program, hiring and managing 7 graduate and undergraduate students.

• Instructor and leader of OE Around The World, touring businesses using OE in a foreign country each spring semester.