Our panel of experts shares actionable strategies healthcare professionals can adopt to drive safety, value, and long-term transformation.
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., FCCM
Chief Quality and Clinical Transformation Officer, University Hospitals; President, UH Veale Healthcare Transformation Institute
What best practices can healthcare personnel begin to implement today to support continuous improvement in the healthcare industry?
They need to transform. Here are three practices that each individually improve organizations; together, they transform. We call this approach “living and leading with love.” Here is how to operationalize it.
- Believe. Ensure every employee sees it as their job to improve value. Respect them, recognize them, and unleash and inspire them, rather than command and control them.
- Belong to a learning community. Ensure every role and site of care that is involved in a process has a voice in improving it. Ensure a culture and structure to allow the free flow of ideas, regardless of pedigree.
- Build a management and shared accountability system. If you can show a run chart with a slope for a measure that matters, you have a management system. If you stratify that run chart by hospital, unit, clinic, and clinician, and celebrate and learn from the strong performers and support the strugglers, you have a shared accountability system.
What technological application do you see making the greatest impact on improving patient outcomes?
First, we need to integrate various types of data into a platform, such as EMR, Cost, ERP, call response, and infusion pump. Then, we need to use AI to support a management system to get to zero harm. Such a management system would include three things: (1) What is the defect in value, such as the patient is not on the right therapy? (2) What is the next best action? and (3) Was that action performed within the desired specification, such as within 30 minutes, and if not, what is the escalation?
FedEx has a very high on-time delivery rate by doing something like this. Every package has a job to do at every step in its journey. If it does not do it, there are alerts. For example, a job of a box may be to stay on the conveyor belt. If it falls off, it must be put back within 2 minutes. If it is not, there is escalation. This is how we will get to zero harm with technology.
Karen Wolk Feinstein, Ph.D.
President and CEO, Jewish Healthcare Foundation and Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative
What best practices can healthcare personnel begin to implement today to support continuous improvement in the healthcare industry?
The list of credible improvements and verifiable best practices that would make healthcare safer today is voluminous. The question is: Why is progress so slow? Safety in healthcare lags behind other complex, high-risk industries because we have no single agency or entity that is created solely to review, test, and certify best practices, and then present recommendations to accreditors and regulators. For decades, safety advocates have called for a National Patient Safety Board. We have none. Imagine aviation, mining, and construction with no agency responsible for advancing safety.
What technological application do you see making the greatest impact on improving patient outcomes?
I see the greatest impact coming from advanced care navigation systems that use AI to help patients with timely interventions, accurate medication reconciliation, and smarter referrals. These navigation systems should build a more responsive healthcare service network. With the support of AI/ML technologies, primary care providers can incorporate considerations from real-time data, demographic variables, available resources, environmental factors, and personalized predictions to act more accurately and effectively.
