HA540 Unit 3 Discussion

Using as reference: 

Title: Integrating Quality and Strategy in Health Care Organizations 

Edition: 1st (2013) 

Author: Sadeghi, Sarmad / Shabot, M. Michael / Barzi, Afsaneh / Mikhail, Osama Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Book 

ISBN: 978-0-7637-9540-5 

Chapters 7-9 (Sadeghi, Barzi, Mikhail, & Shabot) 

In not less than 250 words Discuss

In the healthcare setting measuring quality is what the quality teams like to make sure is excellent.  Pretend, that you are the new quality improvement director at the hospital. You have evaluated tons of patient surveys, complaints, and clinical patient data reports. What steps would you take to improve the quality and would you assemble together a quality team to help make improvements to your hospital?  What steps would you take to measure the current level of quality at the hospital? 

In two different paragraph with not less than 100 words give your personal opinion to Elena Mears and  Dianna Adair 

 Dianna Adair 

The first steps for improving quality are to make sure there is a clear business performance measurement to track quality, as it says in the book, for quantifying the quality performance gaps. There should be clear tracking of safety, efficacy, efficiency, equity, time, and patient-centeredness (Sadeghi, Barzi, Mikhail, & Shabot, 2013).

I would say assembling a small team (if the hospital can spare them) of department leads to meet and discuss quality concerns and implement quality changes would be a good idea. I would work with these department leads to come up with a plan that aligns with how their departments work as well as the overall organizational needs using the aforementioned items being tracked.

For examples of how these measures can be tracked, safety could be measured in how long it has been since a staff member or patient has been injured on the premises or the percentage of healthcare workers using proper PPE and handwashing during random daily checks plus patient reports from surveys. Timeliness could be measured by how long it takes for test results to be processed, how long patients wait in the waiting area and also in the exam room, and how long total the patient spends in the facility grouped by severity. I won’t go into examples for everything because I don’t want to write a novel, but you get the idea.

To improve safety measures, we should aim for 100% on patient surveys when asking about if the nurse or doctor wore fresh gloves and cleaned their hands, as well as with random checks by head nurses or other designated staff. To improve timeliness, set goals for how long things should take in normal circumstances, and aim to hit those targets at least 80% of the time.

In order to hit targets, staff could be subjected to training modules on the computer, meetings to remind them of targets and ask what they need to be provided to make it happen. Each department head would be responsible for their department meeting goals, and I would oversee and evaluate their progress and see if the department heads need to be doing things differently based on how the organization does as a whole.

Regards,
Dianna

References:
Sadeghi, S., Barzi, A., Mikhail, O., & Shabot, M. M. (2013). Integrating Quality and Strategy in Health Care Organizations. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.

Elena Mears

What is measured is achieved.   I’m not sure where this saying comes from, but it seems true of most organizations.  In healthcare as with other industries, it’s key to build a team of internal stakeholders and users who can set expectations of quality and interpret the resulting measurements within the organization.    Once that team is in place, the first step is to determine what should be measured.

If organizational quality has never been measured in the facility, organizations such as the National Quality Strategy (NQS) provide tools and guidance to build a program (AHRQ, 2017).  Mirroring the six aims of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) – safety, effectiveness, patient-centered, timeliness, efficiency, and equitability – will ensure that the facility is following established indicators of healthcare industry quality (Sadeghi, 2013).    Experts suggest starting with five generic measures:  technical quality, customer satisfaction, speed, product cost reduction, and cash flow from operations (Sadeghi, 2013).  

For example, to assess patient satisfaction, the facility could use an industry standard patient satisfaction survey, and have it administered by an outbound call center after the patient has discharged from the hospital.  The results of the survey should be linked to the patient’s functional status before and after hospitalization in order to determine if the treatment or outcome was positive (Joshi, et al., 2014).  The resulting data would be reported to the quality improvement team.

References

About the National Quality Strategy. (2017). Retrieved from  ahrq.gov/ working.

forquality/about/index.html

Joshi, M., Ransom, E. R., Nash, D. B., & Ransom, S. B. (2014). The Healthcare Quality Book:

Vision, Strategy, and Tools: Vol. Third edition. Health Administration Press.

Sadeghi, S. et al. (2013). Integrating quality and strategy in health care organizations.

Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.