Quality improvement initiatives and outcomes at Sutter Davis Hospital

Award Winning Practices in Quality Initiatives

Quality Initiative Practices

Sutter Davis Hospital (SDH) offers acute care services in four basic areas, namely, medical-surgical along with ICU, emergency care, surgical services and pregnancy and maternity services. This 48-bed facility is the only one in Calif that offers acute care services. There are only two such facilities in the whole county. The hospital offers services tailored along the structure of Sutter Health System. There are 385 workers at this facility. There is an extra team of 100 volunteers to support the employees. In 2012, the facility generated almost $95 million in revenue (NIST, 2013).

The quality management model used in SDH

The core elements of the hospitals performance enhancements is pointed out in their in the system of leadership. SDH uses the PDSA approach which is known to be fast and data based. It facilitates faster reaction by medical teams to changes in process that work or the ones that are progressively refined. Process improvement and innovation team (PIIT) provides formal supervision of processes. The Interdisciplinary Practice Council (IPC) provides tracking, aligning and improves innovation opportunities. Innovation is a key element in performance enhancement. Innovations are followed by the IPCs and PIIT teams.

They conduct their evaluation via the dashboard and the profiles in departments. The reports are in line with the central policies and enable the targets to trickle from the higher levels of SDH and spread across all levels all the way to the front-line employees through the Performance Management System. Best practice and learning opportunities in the organization are identified by use of evaluation strategies. Best practice is shared through several methods as described. Organizational learning also takes place via Baldridge feedback and assessment meeting that occurs every year (Sutter Davis Hospital, 2013).

What the Winning Organization Did To Achieve Improvement

Through the adoption of the Baldridge system, SDH became a leading performer in a range of service areas. These include readmission ratings, and the average hospital stays for patients with pneumonia, acute myocardial infarction and heart failure. The emergency room wait time at the hospital was radically improved by reducing it from 45 minute in 2008 to 22 minutes in 2012. The acceptable, standard benchmark for wait time in California is way up at 58 minutes.

The facility improved in the following areas by following Baldridge practices.

Strategic planning

Customer service

Leadership

Knowledge management, analysis and measurement

Employee satisfaction

Focus on operations.

Use of continuous quality improvement as a basis for implementing change in health care system

Whatever the business environment might be, quality improvement strategy has been to identify the challenge, apply a solution, and move to solve the next challenge. Conversely, effective quality improvement demands that a progressive evaluation of system processes to ascertain that no area is left unattended. Organizations should take up data collection as a continuous process to infuse better quality in services even when the situation seems to be perfectly normal. It does not allow for waiting until matters become difficult for contemplating quality improvement. CQI (continuous quality improvement) allows for implementation of interventions for patient experience improvement and ensures that such interventions are effective.