Define your goal
The first thing Penrose and his team had to do was define what, exactly, was “perfect.” He knew he couldn’t just expect his employees to improve without giving them a more concrete idea of what he was asking them to do. Without context, “perfect care” is just words.
“Sending the message of perfect care is one thing; showing them what we mean by it and defining it for them is another,” Penrose says. “We’ve had a lot of ‘A-ha’ moments amongst the staff when we show them the quality metrics that we are looking at and connect the dots for them. This is what we mean when we say perfect care.”
The basic definition Penrose and his team came up with was simple: error-free care. The more formal definition used is more detailed: safe, timely, effective, evidence-based and sacred. The first four factors are measurable; the fifth ties in with another health system goal — making each patient’s experience at St. Jude a sacred encounter.
Those categories are the benchmarks that Penrose’s employees aim for as they strive for perfection. Everything is measured, monitored and reported.
“We’re looking at the fundamentals of what our caregivers do for patients,” he says. “We have all kinds of quality metrics that we look at simply by measuring how many times we provide care perfectly — meaning we do everything we’re supposed to do and we have the outcome that was intended for the patient.
“That’s how we know when we’ve arrived at perfect. When we are looking at metrics to hold ourselves accountable to or what we should look to target improvement on, they should fit in those categories.”
By tracking patient outcomes, Penrose can see how safe, timely and effective his employees are working. And by measuring evidence-based elements of employee performance, Penrose can read one of the medical journals to see how St. Jude measures up.
“There is evidence that is published all the time,” he says. “A lot of the university hospitals throughout the country have different publications. We use those as basis or starting point for the protocols we put in place for our patients and that we encourage our doctors to go forward with.”
