Over the past 30 years, many health systems have pursued improvements in care delivery to be safer and more effective/efficient. When these activities fail to achieve expected results, two common failures are typically cited, leadership and culture, but the main problem is often the underlying systems.
Multiple health systems have created systems-focused improvement programs to overcome these challenges and improve quality/safety of healthcare. They include Jefferson Health (JH) in PA/NJ, Prisma Health in SC, and Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC). Each has built operating models that support continuous learning/improvement via system redesign. These and similar approaches are called “care operating systems” and share characteristics, behaviors and principles. They deliver strong results and do so in ways that become habitual. The system fades into the background and human-to-human interaction moves to the foreground to deliver the best possible care. Examples include:
- They deeply value and appreciate the commitment and passion of their people. At JH, leaders regularly celebrate staff/teams that identify a potential safety risk that leads to large-scale improvement and risk mitigation.
- They appreciate that healthcare is complex, and that complexity needs strong default systems. At JH’s Abington Hospital, unit-level leaders have an electronic real-time dashboard that orients the entire care team to the unit and system level priorities that matter during that shift and that day.
- They do not see safety, equity and experience as silos. Managing domains separately sub-optimizes management of them all. Toward that end, managers of operations, quality and IT at GBMC have created unit-based dashboards to understand the experience of pain in maternity care, potentially avoidable Cesarean sections and other maternity-related complications and then use clinical process improvement to cut those complications systematically.
- They believe in real transparency. At Medstar Health in MD, VA and DC, they have shown that disclosing a harmful care event when it happens, apologizing for it and being transparent with patients following an unexpected outcome can increase trust, decrease liability claims and lead to safer care.
MOSIMTEC has significant experience addressing systems issues at medical facilities. For a healthcare provider, we built a simulation model and conducted analysis on an Emergency Department in its current/future states, examining patient throughput, waiting times, staff utilization and exam room utilization. For a hospital, we developed a simulation model to assess and optimize medication delivery to determine the best combination of storage location, inventory levels and process rules to increase patient satisfaction while minimizing labor overhead related to replenishment/medication administration. MOSIMTEC can help future-proof your business.
Keywords: Healthcare, care delivery, continuous learning, continuous improvement, system redesign, Jefferson Health, Prisma Health, Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Medstar Health, care operating systems
Read more: https://hbr.org/2024/07/to-improve-health-care-focus-on-fixing-systems-not-people?autocomplete=true