Healthcare – like many other sectors – is in a process of transformation. A social transformation that has an impact on culture, systems and the use of technolog. Moreover, it has the ultimate aim of improving the quality of medical care for each patient. This is how how High-Performance Healthcare is making its own revolution.
This is the resource you need to achieve a high performance healthcare
The most neglected resource in healthcare is the human capacity of its professionals; from the people who actively care for the patients to the management teams.
It is a must to enable health professionals to respond quickly to patients’ needs and thus achieve excellence in health care by:
- Creating collaborative settings that empower health professionals to solve problems quickly and work together and …
- Introducing agile methodologies from the management environments. Then the working teams can respond in the shortest time possible to the demands of the medical center without compromising the quality of care. Action and continuous learning are the instruments that have to be applied here.
Thedacare, an example of High-Performance Healthcare
The Thedacare system is designed for increasing the well-being of patients through continuously developing the capabilities of all its professionals. They improve by eliminating waste of financial resources and innovating the care process to deliver more value to each patient.
As an example of agile leadership routine, the system defines every morning a two-hour period free of meetings for all executives. In this time each of them takes a coaching role with the frontline teams.
To ensure the maximum effectiveness of this process, each executive has been trained in systemic coaching routines learned from Toyota. These routines are the basis for having constructive dialogues with plant (care) teams and finding ways to overcome obstacles that may rise during the patient care process.
Like in all High-Performance Organizations, the system has been developed under the principle of:
Problems are solved more quickly and effectively the closer they can be identified to their source.
Agile methodologies have a positive effect on the outcome of the health sector
In only two years, the results of Thedacare confirmed the following improvements in their hospitals after adopting Agile methodologies:
- 88% of their quality indicators
- 85% of their patient satisfaction indicators
- 83% of the indicators to measure commitment and involvement of their teams
- 50% of their financial indicators
Additionally, thanks to these systems, the growth of the health professionals translates directly into improved quality of patient care. In other words, as the critical and analytical skills of the professionals develop, so does the flexibility and speed of response to the changing needs of patients.
How to improve patient care
Our experience in the health sector has tahught us the following: if patient well-being is not understood as a process of value creation, inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses are created, instead. But this is not what happens in High-Performance Healthcare.
Frequently, this waste of economic and human resources is due to the lack of a holistic understanding of the overall system. And that leads to decision making based on unit costs and ends up in widespread cost overruns.
Therefore, the focus should be shifted from the short-term perspective of «resource efficiency» – which aims to keep doctors, nurses and machines as busy as possible – to a more holistic understanding based on the well-being of patients.
In this approach,
The focus is not on squeezing resources to 200% of their capacity, but on reaching objectives, eliminating cost excess and improving the value.
Due to the complexity of today’s health systems, these two objectives can only be achieved by training all the professionals in healthcare for a holistic understanding of the value chain concept.
That´s the first step for professionals to eliminate any waste that might disrupt the flow in the system. It requires the collaboration of different professionals. These professionals, in turn, must improve their communication and teamwork skills to create total synchronization in their activities in the interests of the patient’s well-being.
This is how High-Performance Healthcare is improving the patient’s wellbeing.
Each and every second counts for the well-being of the patients in High-Performance Healthcare
Having more time and more capacities is very important for health professionals and their patients. Value for the well-being of patients is created by more and qualitatively improved interaction with and between the professionals who care for them.
The doctor’s visit is a good example. Sometimes, doctors need to spend the majority of the visit updating patient records, performing administrative tasks, and undertaking unnecessary movements. This leaves them little or no chance to get involved with their patients.
Getting rid of the waste in these visits, in terms of the flow of well-being for the patients, allows the doctors to focus their time and attention on engaging patients in adopting healthy habits and preventing disease. This automatically translates into a positive impact on patient health and the long-term sustainability of the health system.
Turning minutes of waste into minutes dedicated to making the patient’s well-being flow dramatically reduces the number of times each patient has to return to the care center due to health problems. That is the simple equation that will make our health system sustainable. Let´s get started to transform your health center into a High-Performance Healthcare center!
