Listen to the voices
Feedback plays an important role in any quality improvement
process.
“There was a book that came out in the 1990s called, ‘If
Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do
Differently,’ and it was revolutionary in the health care industry because it brought a new way of thinking about service and
customers,” Murphy says. “We studied Disney, and we ended
up hiring consultants from the Disney Institute to help us begin
our first quality improvement initiative. We started by reviewing feedback from focus groups comprised of our three stake-holder groups — patients, physicians and employees — and
we used their feedback to identify our initial 12 major project
areas. An example would be the goal of improving patient satisfaction, which, of course, ties back to one of our pillars of
excellence.
“Next, we needed to develop an infrastructure to drive our
process. We organized a senior leadership team made up of 26
midlevel managers and VPs, called the model developers, to
establish a structure. The model development team devoted
more than half their working hours to quality during the first
four to six months of the program, and they were tasked with
recommending a quality improvement structure and a communications system.”
The model developers recommended 100 different action
teams, and more than 1,000 employees, including physicians,
volunteered to serve on the teams.
“It’s important to provide your quality improvement teams
with all the tools they need and the complete leeway to investigate the challenges and recommend solutions because no
one knows the answer about how to improve quality before
you begin,” Murphy says.
Sharp conducted quarterly leadership development sessions
where the model developers were trained on the fundamentals
of the quality improvement process, and the model developers,
in turn, passed the information along to their teams.
“With more than 1,000 employees involved, it was really
never a problem getting employees to buy in,” Murphy says.
“Also having so many members of your senior leadership team
involved in the process pulls everyone together. The projects
dealt with small components that support the main goal, such
as increasing patient satisfaction by reducing wait times in the
emergency room. The teams made recommendations about
how to improve the process, and those were referred back to
senior management for approval.
Surveys were used throughout the process to benchmark
progress.
“We were constantly measuring the voice of the customer
through patient satisfaction surveys and employee satisfaction
surveys,” Murphy says. “If we didn’t think we were making
enough progress, we changed the tools or our solutions based
upon the feedback we received.”
Gauging progress by collecting employee feedback was vital to
measuring quality improvement progress.
“We set annual goals for our organization’s progress tied to
each pillar, a process that served as a spark plug to help drive
us forward, and we reviewed our goals and our progress each
year during our annual employee meeting. In addition, we
included those major goals in the performance plans for everyone at the line-manager level and above. It gets everyone
focused and engaged when you bring the performance criteria
into individual plans, and the employees were excited at our
annual meeting when they saw how we had progressed
through the various cycles of improvement as documented by
the feedback from the stakeholder surveys.”