With stretched budgets and serious nursing shortages, hospital leaders need efficient operations now more than ever before. This path to efficiency begins with a hospital-wide mentality that goes beyond specific department goals. Hospitals can deliver care efficiently without compromising quality or safety by optimizing core processes around patient needs, smoothing flow across the care journey, empowering staff to solve problems, and embracing innovation.
Reigniting a Culture of Excellence
Energize employees around shared purpose and values to help instill operational excellence. Leaders should reconnect staff to the hospital’s overarching mission by highlighting things like powerful patient stories, which help provide meaning to the daily work.
Leaders should also emphasize virtues like integrity, teamwork, accountability, and commitment to continuous improvement. Celebrate employees who exemplify these qualities, and link reward systems to behaviors that drive excellence.
However, avoid overly ambitious targets that seem unattainable. Excellence is a direction, not a destination, so focus on steady, sustainable progress through small daily improvements versus radical transformation overnight. With a culture that supports excellence, positive change accumulates.
Optimizing Core Clinical Processes
Many hospital leaders tackle operations by implementing isolated lean or automation tools. While helpful, driving excellence requires optimizing complete care processes.
Start by mapping the patient journey from admission to discharge. Analyze each step through the eyes of patients and frontline staff rather than managers. This reveals wasteful delays, unnecessary steps, and quality risks.
Improvements should focus on smoothing patient progression through the hospital and coordinating hand-offs between departments. For example, can discharge steps be completed earlier in the stay? Can you bundle testing to reduce repeat transportation?
Equally important is standardizing processes that directly impact clinical outcomes and safety. For example, checklists and protocols for high-risk interventions like sepsis treatment ensure reliability.
With core care pathways streamlined and consistently executed, patients experience coordinated services optimizing quality.
Empowering Staff to Solve Problems
Too often, hospital leaders view frontline employees as merely implementers rather than innovators. But staff closest to patients best understand operational frustrations and opportunities, so empower them to fix problems.
Provide quick improvement training to report issues and rapid tests of solutions. Ensure staff have time allocated specifically for improvement experiments and recognize creativity and initiative rather than criticizing missteps.
Form cross-functional teams combining clinical and non-clinical staff to tackle complex issues. This broader perspective sparks fresh thinking. Let ideas bubble up from the front lines rather than handing down edicts.
Leaders should coach, not control the improvement process. Check in on team progress with curiosity and support. As staff drive changes, experience grows hospital-wide capacity for excellence.
Harnessing Technology and Innovation
While technology alone cannot drive excellence, harness emerging innovations. Leaders must balance openness to experimentation with prudent implementation.
Guiding principles include choosing technologies that integrate with clinical workflow rather than disrupt it. Rigorously test innovations on a small scale before systemwide rollouts and bring clinical staff into planning conversations to spot issues early.
Some proven technologies like automated pharmacy dispensing boost accuracy while reducing delays. Data analytics also offer real-time visibility into bottlenecks like emergency department wait times while smart pumps with dose range warnings avert medication errors.
Mental Health Consulting
Amid broad operational change, hospital leaders should not overlook opportunities to improve behavioral health programs. The experts at Horizon Health say that mental health consulting can provide objective assessments of workflow, identify care gaps, and recommend evidence-based solutions.
However, consultants must also empower internal teams to play an active role in shaping recommendations. Engage psychiatric staff and patients in mapping ideal care journeys; this insider expertise ensures excellent care, not just efficient care.
Conclusion
Achieving operational excellence in hospitals requires aligning leaders, staff, and systems around patient-focused values. Enabling leadership to engage staff, optimize processes, apply technology, and encourage innovation, hospitals position themselves to provide timely, high-quality, and cost-effective care.
