Sustaining an improvement in healthcare requires organizations to embed new practices into their daily workflows and new ideas into their cultures.
Here are six ways to hardwire healthcare practices into an organization from articles published in the past three months.
1. Thomas Blasco, MD, a managing partner of Surgical Directions and medical director of the Illinois Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Surgery Center in Morton Grove, suggests embedding quality checks into physician billing sheets to hardwire perioperative changes into the organization.
2. University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville has embedded nutrition screening into its admission process by adding it to a checklist, according to Beth Quatrara, DNP, RN, a clinical nurse specialist with the digestive health department at UVA Health System.
3. Someone should document discussions about enterprise risk management to hardwire ERM into a healthcare organization's strategic plan, according to Kreg Weigand, partner, and Eric Parker, director, at KPMG.
4. Quint Studer, founder and chairman of the board at Studer Group, says hospitals and health systems can hardwire attentiveness into their organizations by being more transparent.
5. Henry Ford Health System in Detroit trains physicians and staff on a communication model to hardwire a service approach to patients in physicians' work, according to Sven Gierlinger, vice president of hospitality and service culture at Henry Ford Health System.
6. Including alerts or other messages in electronic health records that remind staff of appropriate practices can help standardize new practices, according to Maureen McGovern, RN, director of risk management and patient safety officer of South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, N.Y.
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