Question

Research and choose a public health, hospital, nursing home or other health care quality or performance improvement issue or problem. Write a 3-5 page paper on how you would go about improving this problem. What types of data would you gather? Why? Would you organize teams? Why? If so, how would you choose people for these teams? What tools and strategies would you utilize to analyze the problems? Why? What strategies or action plans would you recommend? What types of controls would you recommend going forward? How would you measure and monitor this problem issue and its improvement?

Answer 1

What is the Problem?

Studies shows that over 70% of the patient experience is influenced by quality of nonclinical services. Understanding this customer experience will provide better ROI to the hospitals.

How to Improve the same?

1. Developing statistical model to identify and work on factors influencing patient experience. Identify all the parameters and the output which we need to improve (Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score). Post which a statistical regression equation can be built on the data to check what are the major factors influencing the experience and then improving the same.

2. Continuous monitoring of patients in reception area to anticipate the shift in their expectations.

What type of data that can be collected??

1. Waiting time for Patients in lobby

2. Ease of the forms being filled for admission

3. Hassle free ways for availing the benefits/claiming insurance

4. Availability of doctors in all categories

5. Patient Safety Index

6. Emergency response time

7. Ambulance services availability

8. Cleanliness index

9. Food Quality

10. Competency of support staffs (nurses)/doctors

All these data will influence the quality of service being provided. These data along with a rating obtained for Patient experience score will help in knowing critical factors.

Would you organize teams??

1. In some cases where it is required, teams can be formed Ex: Learning & Development team to work on competency gaps, Operations management team to work on operational excellence etc

Choosing people will be basis the competency.

Tools or Strategy?

Since the problem itself is unknown, Six Sigma methodology for operational excellence suits better in this case. As it will help in end-to-end analysis of the problem along with solutions and control.

Strategies and action plans??

Strategy will be to define all the processes very clearly along with associated metrics and train the individuals on those processes. This will help in having a uniform view on the individual steps.

Action Plan will be to have a independent party (specializing in process consulting and improvement) to observe the process and define the optimized process acceptable to management. Post that a training needs to be provided to all the employees on the basis of grades.

Controls?

1. Having Management information system in place, who will have check points and collect the data through systems or by conducting surveys as applicable basis the metric.

2. If there are any major deviations in the scores are observed for a particular department, then they should be taken up for questioning.

Measure and Monitoring??

1. CRM software being used in hospitals will have times

2. Surveys to patients in right time with out bothering

3. Process scores by the manager basis the observations