Many health care leaders are beginning to see the benefits that Six Sigma tools can bring to not only solving current operational problems, but also creating long-term solutions.
One example comes from the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.
The cancer center’s Director of Clinical Operations Lauren Giolai, MBA, BSN, RN shared with Oncology Nursing News that “if you don’t set up the process so that it’s a sustainable win, people get tired and suffer from change fatigue. Creating collaborative solutions that make it better for everyone are the keys to success.”
Giolai is an oncology nurse, a job that can be incredibly rewarding as well as challenging. Cancer care nurses develop close relationships with patients, as well as their families and caregivers, over months and years of treatment. In addition to providing treatment, they also teach them how to manage their symptoms and conditions. They get to be an advocate, cheerleader, supporter and encourager for patients facing one of the toughest times in their lives. They also keep tabs on a patient’s changing condition and coordinate needed therapies. They frequently are the liaison between patients and doctors, conveying important updates.
Because of their compromised immune systems, cancer patients often encounter sudden, potentially life-threatening changes in their condition. Getting them to prompt medical care often can mean the difference between life and death. One area Giolai and her team found opportunities for improvement was in reducing wait times for cancer patients who come to the hospital’s emergency department with neutropenic fever, caused by low levels of infection-fighting white blood cells.
Using Six Sigma tools, a multi-disciplinary team focused on cutting down the time it took from the time patients with neutropenic fever entered the emergency department to when they received intravenous antibiotics. It took input from many departments within the hospital, but eventually a systematic, data-driven approach paid off.
The cancer center started giving patients a neutropenic fever alert card that they could share with ambulance personnel and emergency department staff when they entered the hospital. They also added a field on the emergency department’s sign-in form to allow patients an opportunity to indicate neutropenic fever.
They then developed a neutropenic fever alert system that emergency department staff could use to trigger a team that would quickly respond to the bedside when such a patient was identified.
Giolai credits these simple improvements with saving hundreds of lives. The task force won 2 awards, Overall Showcase and Greatest Customer Impact, at the 2017 Florida Sterling Conference Team Showcase competition.
They then used a similar approach to reduce the wait time for lab results by 53% and overall wait time by 26% The results? Patient satisfaction scores went through the roof.
Giolai said that breaking down silos and bringing together different departments that don’t normally interact to solve a problem is one of the key benefits of Six Sigma. She offered tips on how to go about lasting process improvement in health care, including:
- Picking a change that will impact patients
- Mapping out the process
- Getting input from the customers and stakeholders
- Forming teams with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives
- Defining clearly what you want to improve
- Defining clearly the steps you need to take
- Completing the steps and track the results, making changes as needed
Kudos to the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center team on a job well done. What tools have been helpful to create sustainable improvement at your workplace?
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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