At the Becker's Hospital Review Annual Meeting in Chicago on May 10, Charleston, S.C.-based Roper St. Francis Healthcare COO Marion Martin, RN, shared her system's journey to improve infection prevention using Six Sigma and Lean strategies.
Ms. Martin said when she came to the system, the organization had a bevy of rich data — but was hardly using it. She and her team led efforts to have better data-driven strategies built into their workflows. Now, 452 leaders in the system are required to be Six Sigma green belts at a minimum.
"The truth is, we'd gotten used to ugly," she said, referring to waste and inconsistencies in the hospitals' processes. With her focus on improving infection control, she brought staff members at all levels of relevant workflows to brainstorming sessions, then filtered through the ideas to slim down processes into their simplest forms. That helped to standardize the process, eliminated wasted time and manpower and helped to inform leadership and staff who was accountable for which tasks at every stage of a patients' care. Procedures, routines and even products were standardized to narrow variances in the workflows.
After a regional outbreak of a virus that caused severe diarrhea, three questions were added to the nurses' triage script to better identify patients who might have the contaminable disease and direct them to the appropriate "swim lane" for care and processing. Using this model, they were also able to connect patients with nursing homes they came from and the ambulances that brought them to the hospital, helping them discover that the facilities and vehicles were not being properly cleaned. The high frequency of Friday afternoon cases also helped inform them there was a gap in when patients were receiving their prescribed antibiotics that led to the recurrence of the symptoms.
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Ms. Martin said when she came to the system, the organization had a bevy of rich data — but was hardly using it. She and her team led efforts to have better data-driven strategies built into their workflows. Now, 452 leaders in the system are required to be Six Sigma green belts at a minimum.
"The truth is, we'd gotten used to ugly," she said, referring to waste and inconsistencies in the hospitals' processes. With her focus on improving infection control, she brought staff members at all levels of relevant workflows to brainstorming sessions, then filtered through the ideas to slim down processes into their simplest forms. That helped to standardize the process, eliminated wasted time and manpower and helped to inform leadership and staff who was accountable for which tasks at every stage of a patients' care. Procedures, routines and even products were standardized to narrow variances in the workflows.
After a regional outbreak of a virus that caused severe diarrhea, three questions were added to the nurses' triage script to better identify patients who might have the contaminable disease and direct them to the appropriate "swim lane" for care and processing. Using this model, they were also able to connect patients with nursing homes they came from and the ambulances that brought them to the hospital, helping them discover that the facilities and vehicles were not being properly cleaned. The high frequency of Friday afternoon cases also helped inform them there was a gap in when patients were receiving their prescribed antibiotics that led to the recurrence of the symptoms.
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