About Us
Introduction
Teh & Associates is a boutique healthcare consulting firm, based in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia, that specializes in healthcare quality, patient safety, and international accreditation of hospitals and clinics.
Established in 2009, the firm consults to a diverse clientele, including government health agencies, hospitals and clinics of all sizes, and management consulting firms. Our clients are located throughout the world, but especially in South, Southeast, and East Asia.
Dr Andy Teh, Founder, Owner, and Principal of Teh & Associates, brings a unique blend of superlative expertise across the full spectrum of healthcare quality management and patient safety, middle and higher management experience, well-honed clinical acumen, razor-sharp consulting know-how, and highly effective communication and interpersonal skills.
Dr Teh is supported by a select team of professionals, each of whom are experts in their respective fields, e.g. nursing, infection control, healthcare facility management, health information management, and health informatics.
In addition to consulting, Teh & Associates offers education and training programs in all facets of healthcare quality management and patient safety to individuals and organizations around the globe. Teh & Associates’ resources designed to assist individuals become Certified Professionals in Healthcare Quality (CPHQs) have been both pioneering and industry-leading for more than a decade. Our private CPHQ coaching program, in which students interact exclusively with Dr Teh, boasts a 100% track record of delivering a passing score on the student’s first attempt – a success rate unrivalled by any other program or course purported to prepare candidates for the CPHQ exam, anywhere in the world.
When you choose Teh & Associates, you can rest assured you are working with a team that prioritizes rigorous methodology, impeccable business ethics, and an uncanny ability to create value.
We stay ahead of the curve through innovation, continuous learning, and dedication to advancing the healthcare quality profession.
Our WHY
Our mission is to bring about better and safer healthcare at a cost that represents good value.
Better and Safer Healthcare
We believe there is much opportunity for improvement across all the recognized dimensions of healthcare quality:
- Appropriateness
- Availability
- Competency
- Continuity
- Effectiveness
- Efficacy
- Efficiency
- Equity
- Patient-centeredness
- Respect and Caring
- Safety
- Timeliness
Good Value
Desired healthcare outcomes ought to be accomplished with appropriate – not excessive – amounts of resources, e.g. time, human capital, money. Employing the right improvement efforts will often yield the same outcomes with fewer resources.
In addition, we believe the “right improvement efforts” – e.g. process improvement or reengineering, or education and training in quality improvement – should not come at an excessive cost to the client.
For example, the changes a hospital has to make to earn accreditation or reaccreditation, e.g. by Joint Commission International, should not be accompanied by a monetary cost that cripples the hospital’s annual budget.
Improvements should be made at a cost that represents good value. Put another way, any improvement work should be rewarded by a decent positive return on investment.
HOW We Do Things
Our Core Values
Since our inception in 2009, everything we do at Teh & Associates have been – and will always be – guided by three core values:
These core values of our firm are not merely words on the office wall (or website) that sound nice. Instead, they are deeply held principles which have helped us succeed through all sorts of situations, from the early startup days through to our current busy schedule, and (yes,) even the COVID-19 pandemic.
Further, we actively work on improving our performance on each of these core values by applying improvement science and by using objective performance indicators, e.g. Trustworthiness Quotient (for Core Value #1: Build Trustworthiness).
1. Build Trustworthiness
Trust is the foundation from which we develop healthy, long-lasting, and productive relationships. To engender trust, we must first ensure we are worthy of that trust.
For building trustworthiness, we utilize The Trust Equation, a model of trustworthiness developed by Charles H. Green of Trusted Advisor Associates. The Trust Equation comprises four variables to measure trustworthiness – Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy, and Self-orientation – and is represented by the following equation:
Trustworthiness Quotient, or Trust Quotient for short, is the quantitative form of the Trustworthiness Equation and a measure of personal trustworthiness. It is a trustworthiness score. We are committed to continually improve our Trustworthiness Quotient by:
- Increasing Credibility – by demonstrating high levels of integrity, maintaining professional competence, and being invariably honest, accurate, and transparent in our communication. We endeavor to use language that is appropriate to our audience.
- Increasing Reliability – by consistently delivering on our promises, big or small. Our service standards are well documented and are often communicated to our clients; we have been so successful in meeting our ever-rising standards that our long-term clients are able to correctly anticipate many aspects of our conduct, such as our punctuality, adherence to schedules, methodical approach to situational analysis, candor, and pragmatism.
- Increasing Intimacy – by expressing our human side, strengthening our empathy, and improving our emotional intelligence.
- Reducing Self-Orientation – by showing how much we care about our clients and about meeting their needs. For example, we waived all our consulting fees for work done during the entire local COVID-19 lock-down period even though none of our clients ever requested this of us. With this move, we send a clear and unequivocal message to not only our client organizations, but also the rest of the world, that we stand in solidarity with our healthcare colleagues in taking the fight to the pandemic.
2. The Right Results, The Right Way
Every client or prospect presents with at least one issue that needs to be addressed, i.e. a deliverable. One may be seeking Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation. Another may feel they need help with establishing a quality management and/or patient safety program. Yet another may want to boost the effectiveness of root cause analyses conducted in their organization.
Once we agree to a deliverable, we are committed to achieving the desired outcome (e.g. a quantified reduction in patient safety events or JCI accreditation) and/or provide the required output (e.g. a comprehensive gap analysis report). Our track record for producing the deliverables of any type of engagement is immaculate.
However, we do not always agree to take on work. Each prospective engagement is scrutinized to determine if it meets predetermined criteria, foremost of which is alignment with our mission and core values. For example, we will outright reject a prospective engagement in which we know, or strongly suspect, the client or prospective organization intends to game the system for whatever purpose, most commonly accreditation or reaccreditation. Along the same lines, we do not conduct training simply for the sake of having training, without any clear objective, goal, or plan. Both gaming the system and training solely for the sake of training are actions that directly conflict with our mission and core values. Our scarce, valuable resources will instead be channeled to more productive endeavors.
Meaningful and sustainable healthcare quality and patient safety outcomes can only be achieved through proper means, which include, but are not limited to:
- Strong leadership
- A shared desire among staff to make processes and outcomes better every day
- Proven quality improvement methods and tools
- A performance measurement plan
- Making many tests of change, some (but certainly not all) of which will contribute to improvement
- Appropriate communication and training
- Identified staff who will own the new standard work and who are engaged and onboard with the improvement effort
We will likely decline accepting any prospective engagement if, in our estimation, there is less than a reasonable chance of all the ingredients for satisfactory and sustainable improvement being present.
At Teh & Associates, we are not satisfied with superior outcomes only. Things must be done professionally, ethically, and with compassion.
The right results, accomplished the right way.
3. WOW the Client
We don’t merely aim to meet the needs of the client – that is a given. Each member of our team is responsible for going above and beyond what the client or prospect expects.
WHAT Services We Provide
Teh & Associates offers consulting, education, and training services in:
- Healthcare quality improvement;
- Patient safety;
- Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation.
In addition, we offer various programs and resources that prepare individuals for Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) certification.
We are a niche, specialist consulting firm. We do not offer services in areas such as marketing, human resources, health informatics (unless it is related to healthcare quality or patient safety), medical tourism, etc. even though we have accrued a considerable amount of insight through the course of our work and interactions with clients and subject matter experts. At Teh & Associates, we prefer to remain within our sphere of competence – we will continue to do, and improve in, what we do best, i.e. healthcare quality and patient safety.
Describing all the quality and patient safety issues we can help organizations resolve is akin to a cardiologist describing the different heart problems he or she can diagnose and treat. Or an ophthalmologist giving a list of eye problems he is qualified to diagnose and treat. This is not due to a shortage of content; rather the opposite. We can say a lot about the various problems in healthcare quality and patient safety we can help our clients and prospects solve – it will look like an encyclopedia – and yet we still won’t be able to cover everything. Suffice to say, Teh & Associates has the capacity and expertise to undertake almost any engagement that requires fixing a healthcare quality and/or patient safety issue.
Our assistance in the following areas (in no particular order) are among the more commonly requested:
- JCI hospital accreditation and reaccreditation – gap analysis; change management strategy physician engagement; implementation of improvements; staff education and training.
- Hospital quality management/improvement and/or patient safety program – program review and recommendations for improvement; program development (for both new and existing hospitals).
- Risk management – program development; management of serious clinical adverse events; education and training (e.g. root cause analysis, failure mode and effects analysis).
- Healthcare quality education and training programs (from basic through advanced concepts) – as part of program or employee development; for CPHQ certification; or in preparation for JCI accreditation.
- Clinical pathways – pathway selection and development; implementation.
- Data management – review of performance measures and collected data; education and training (including statistical process control).
- Quality improvement – preparation and team development; education and training; review of improvement work at different levels: organization, functional, cross-functional, department, team; coaching.
- IHI Global Trigger Tool (GTT) and other trigger tools – education and training; implementation.
- Physician performance – physician engagement; education and training; implementation of ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE) and focused professional practice evaluation (FPPE).
- Infection control – all aspects of infection control: program evaluation; program implementation; reporting mechanisms.
- Second victim program – program development; education and training.
- Culture of patient safety – assessment; program development; education and training.
- Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) certification – workshops; online resources; coaching.
Note: This list is indicative only, not exhaustive.
WHO
Dr Andy Teh, Principal
Andy Teh, MBBS, MSc, PGCert, DLSHTM, CPHQ is the Founder, Owner, and Principal of Teh & Associates. He founded the firm in 2009 after a stellar career that spanned more than 15 years, serving as a clinician and physician executive in hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region.
Dr Teh also consults to the investment and healthcare communities through the Gerson Lehman Group.
Our Clients
We are proud to serve clientele, diverse in terms of:
- Size – e.g. government and quasi-government agencies, hospital networks, stand-alone hospitals of all sizes, clinics.
- Geographic location – the majority of our clients are in South, Southeast and East Asia, though we also serve ones located as far as North America, Northern Europe, and Africa.
- Stage in their healthcare quality journey.
WHERE We Operate
We can travel to any location in the world.
For any single client, Teh & Associates may perform onsite, offsite, or some combination of onsite and offsite work as required by the engagement. This allows us a great deal of flexibility on how to accomplish the deliverables.
Since its inception in 2009, Teh & Associates has leveraged teleconferencing technology and the Internet to communicate and bring value to its global client base. It’s no wonder the firm made a seamless transition to meetings over Zoom, commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We refrain from travelling to countries or regions we deem unsafe due to armed conflict, civil unrest, natural disaster or rampant crime.
We take a different position on infectious disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics (such as the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020) – we are prepared to travel to any location to work with organizations to prevent and control the spread of infections at any level: hospital, district, country, or region. This is one of the things we are trained to do and one of the reasons the firm exists.
HOW MUCH?
Our Fees
Our fees have always been, and will always be, dependent on the value we provide. Consistent with our mission, our fees will always represent good, if not great, value.
Besides value, other key determinants of our fees are:
- Prior relationship with the client – in terms of quality and duration.
- Scale of the prospective engagement – the larger the scale, the lower our fee in relative terms.
- Income group of the country in which the organization or individual is located – we use the World Bank’s latest country classification by Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, calculated using the World Bank Atlas method.
Guarantee
Our work is guaranteed. We will refund all monies paid should we fail to meet the standards agreed upon with the client. It is worth noting, in more than 13 years of consulting practice, Teh & Associates has never failed to produce the deliverables of any engagement and no client – not even one – has ever requested a refund.
WHEN
Business Hours
We are open from Monday through Friday from 9.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. (GMT+8)
Make an Appointment
For appointments, call +604. 8909 613 or email us.