ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value recently shared an interesting case study about a large California hospital system that found a unique way to replicate exceptional patient care across its many service sites.
The Palo Alto Medical Foundation for Health Care, Research and Education (PAMF) is a well-respected health care organization serving the health needs of more than a million patients who live in four counties in the San Francisco Bay area. PAMF employs 1,500 physicians and approximately 5,000 employees across more than 40 different locations.
Like many large health care organizations, PAMF’s rapid growth in recent years led to consistent care quality across the organization, but the patient experience varied. Yet patient satisfaction surveys showed that patients wanted the same experience no matter what location they went to for care.
As these service conundrums continued to develop, PAMF’s leaders soon discovered that Lean Six Sigma tools could help them create a model of care that meets patient expectations and replicate it at their many locations.
After benchmarking with ThedaCare and hiring leaders experienced in LSS, PAMF’s management team began to realign its primary care delivery system at 40 locations using lean principles.
Borrowing from ThedaCare’s success, they started with the “model cell” concept to align everyone with the goal of improving the patient experience.
What is a “model cell”? Let’s say you’re a large hospital system like PAMF. Is it realistic to find the training and financial resources to help the entire organization “go Lean” all at once?
Probably not. But if you start with one department where the leaders are excited and eager to be the first, you can set a model for the rest of the system to learn from. The cell model becomes a demonstration project, a proof concept, that shows real change and real results.
Otherwise, if you try to implement LSS across an organization without adequate training and support, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and accomplishing little. That is how LSS fails – by not showing results.
PAMF found that the model cell was the best way to help staff learn about LSS principles. The leadership team used this approach to show the rest of the organization what “exceptional care” looks like. This generated excitement among staff, and best practices from the model cell began to spread organically.
Ironically, one of PAMF’s initial successes had more to do with staff satisfaction than with bottom-line improvements. It turns out that juggling a million priorities was creating staff burnout. LSS helped alleviate the problem and get team members home for dinner with their families. They teamed up nurses and medical assistants to work more closely with physicians to quickly and efficiently identify patient concerns, communicate the concern with the physician and speed the process of actual patient care. This improved not only staff satisfaction, but patient satisfaction as well.
If you haven’t read the case study, it’s definitely worth the read. Today, PAMF’s lean initiatives are focused on continuous improvement with a concentrated effort to bring daily engagement into the organization’s specialty care areas. Kudos to the PAMF team making LSS applicable in day-to-day work and improving care for its patients.
How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive workplace.
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