Process improvement initiatives are primarily the creation and implementation of new ideas and behaviors, so as to either provide a continuous improvement or abrupt problem solving within an organization. That being said, there exist numerous process improvement initiatives as well as projects within any healthcare organization. During the weekends various hospitals often undergo certain normal procedures despite the relative increment in patients. Such habits pave the way for inefficiency, longer patient hospital stay and financial loss on a larger case. Hence, in a previous improvement project, electronic data was evaluated to foreshadow and thus prevent bottlenecks during the weekends.
Borrowing from already established business models, the project made use of minute teams divided into two areas; health economics and clinical epidemiology. It has been observed that delays caused by laxity of staff during the weekends presented a high risk of hospital acquired infections (Chassin & Loeb, 2013). Hence, the clinical epidemiology teams were tasked with the responsibility of facilitating treatment and checks of both inpatient and outpatients whereas the health economics teams were to collect and analyze electronic data pertaining to the hospital.
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Within the hospital, there was significant digitalization of both patients’ and staff’s activities. The projected articulated that for every patient administered in each department there should be at least one individual to check the electronic data and thus direct the treatment and if needed admission (Jones-Farmer, Woodall, Steiner, & Champ, 2014). This was important in lessening traffic and identifying free staff who could attend to patients if there was ever an unprecedented increment of exertion on one particular department. The clinical epidemiology teams were to realize the implications of the electronic data to ensure that things on the ground were running smooth.
The greatest challenge in the problem was maintaining a constant flow of manpower across all teams in each department. Despite that, there was a significant decrement in admitted patients stay and less traffic in the hospital albeit during the weekends. This was as a result of prompt treatment time by physicians and proper use of hospital beds (Jones-Farmer et. al, 2014).
Healthcare has over time shifted from just treating a certain ailment to the provision of a cost effective comfortable treatment where the patient is the heart of it all. Thereby, with regards to the success of the above-mentioned process improvement initiative, we were able to facilitate faster and better medical care. As much effort was put into the planning and implementation it was satisfactory seeing its results. Healthcare to me has always been about satisfying the patient and the project did exactly that (Jones-Farmer et. al, 2014).
Moreover, the ability of such an initiative to reduce workload increased my interest drastically in not only the process but health care as a whole. The project mentioned above helped clear unnecessary pile up of work. Lessening of work will always be received cordially by any medical practitioner and I am no exception. Conclusively, despite having its origins in the business world process improvement will be a tool to ameliorate health care (Chassin & Loeb, 2013).
References
Jones-Farmer, L. A., Woodall, W. H., Steiner, S. H., & Champ, C. W. (2014). An overview of phase I analysis for process improvement and monitoring. Journal of Quality Technology , 46 (3), 265.
Chassin, M. R., & Loeb, J. M. (2013). High ‐ reliability health care: getting there from here. Milbank Quarterly , 91 (3), 459-490.
