- Good afternoon, my name is Staff Sergeant Hendricks
here at the 419 Medical Squadron
here at Hill Air Force Base.
This is our presentation for the 2021 Spark Tank.
Our project, and what we hope to accomplish,
is improve medical case processing efficiency.
In the medical world of the Air Force
we care for all of our members,
and any time a member may have what's called
a trigger event, an injury, or a medical condition
that develops, it may cause them to have to create
a medical case to process their ability to stay in
the military or get out due to restrictions.
Now, we take care of all of these different processes daily
and there is a lot of information that is put in
and it is highly inefficient as we do not have
a universal protocol or a universal tracking system
that is used for all of the reserves.
There is a large amount of information.
We have created a tracking system here in our unit
that has more than 13 tabs in a Microsoft Teams Excel sheet.
This is highly improved from when we used to use
an Excel sheet, or even a whiteboard, or paper and pencil
that is still used in other units.
There is still a lot of room for improvement.
The programs that are used often don't communicate
with one another.
There are over 11 different programs that we pull data from
and they often result in having us input information twice.
Because they don't communicate.
Now, this also leads to metrics that are used to measure
our productivity not being accurate.
The case processes are finalized, often times,
before we send the case to [AFRIC 00:01:38]
and they are not able to see the whole scope
of what it goes into creating the process
and getting the information put together.
This is demonstrated in the fact that last year
we submitted 62 cases to [AFRIC 00:01:50]
and we are currently working on over 160,
and we are working on more than that last year
because they don't see the full snapshot.
This affects our ability for manning and the benefits
for our members, and the time that it takes to process
these cases.
We are still processing cases from 2014
due to the lack of tracking.
This delays the members being able to get their benefits
and the medical help that is needed.
The solution we want to create an all encompassing
tracking system that's used universally
to help us know where we stand at all times
and know where we are in the process.
We want it to be able to notify us
when a case hasn't been touched in a specific amount of time
and be able to make sure that we don't drop any cases
by the wayside.
We also want to make sure
that it has accurate reporting systems so that we know
what our productivity is and that our manning
can be judged accordingly.
We hope that by doing these things
and creating a universal system
that we will be able to improve our efficiency
and improve the overall health and wellness and morale
of our units.