Qi Plan Final Organization

Mayo Qi

Mayo Clinic Quality Improvement (QI) Plan

The Quality Improvement Plan laid out here centers on the Mayo Clinic. The healthcare system has an international reputation for providing patient-focused and cooperative medical care for individuals suffering from the most severe illnesses. In addition to maintaining a highly collaborative atmosphere within which physicians, nurses and practitioners work together to resolve medical challenges, the Mayo Clinic is renowned for its innovations in the areas of service delivery and positive treatment outcomes. This is why the focus of a discussion on Quality Improvement has less to do with improving the Mayo Clinic itself than with demonstrating ways of replicating its successes in other healthcare systems.

Goals/Objectives:

The goal that drives the Mayo Clinic is drawn from a patient-centered treatment philosophy. The Mayo Clinic strives to incorporate its patients in the process of achieving desired treatment outcomes. The clinic uses feedback from patients to improve and acknowledge the legitimacy of physicians whilst the importance of care perspectives (Kongstvedt, 2013). The Mayo Clinic is also always in the pursuit of quality assurance, which it maintains by engaging in constant research and clinical practice.

Scope/Description/QI Activities:

There is a pressing interest to find ways of making the Mayo Clinic's successful achievement of its goals applicable in other healthcare contexts. This helps us to define the scope of the present quality improvement plan, the focus of which is on strengthening the quality of analytics and the ability to convey these analytics to other healthcare facilities. The Mayo Clinic (2012) reports that activities will include the use of in-depth medical records studies, informatics and epidemiology health services research. The intent is to yield data from the performance of the Mayo Clinic that can be applied to a healthcare system in need of transformative improvement.

Data Collection Tools:

In order to determine exactly what the Mayo Clinic is doing so successful, a data collection process is required. The Exit Survey has emerged as the preferable data collection method and would use a Likert instrument in order to gather quantitative data on patient experience. The interview method would also be applied in order to gain qualitative data as provided by Mayo Clinic leaders and administrators who have the greatest insight on the informatics that most optimal for assessing hospital performance. Finally, in order to determine the greatest areas of need for the healthcare system outside of the Mayo Clinic, the focus group would be appropriate. Consluting randomly selected respondents in order to compose a sample population from the region, the focus group can offer data on the highest ranked needs in terms of yielding quality analytics.

QI Processes and Methodology:

We proceed to a discussion on the methodology by introducing the performance measurement matrix, a system adopted by a wide range of organizations seeking to gain insight into their own performance. The Mayo Clinic would utilize the performance measurement matrix to demonstrate the qualities in its personnel and processes that are part and parcel to its success.

Using the BSC model as a basis for deriving quality measures, the methodology described calls for the integration of the financial, patient-centered, innovation-drawn and advanced-treatment aspects of its operation into a single mode of evaluation. Using the evaluative methodology promises to offer a template in the proper orientation of personnel that can be applied by other healthcare systems.

Comparative Databases, Benchmarks, Professional Practice Standards:

The Enterprise Learning System (SLS) will also be an important part of benchmarking and consequently databasing emergent standards. The ELS is a system that will not only share clinical knowledge and patient specific triggers with physicians, but will also enable the organization to provide continual medical education as a just-in-time learning approach. This allows for the seamless sharing of information between acute-care providers, specialists, nurses, clinicians and even the primary care physicians and post-acute care providers that will be seen following a hospital visit. This means that decisions can be made regarding patients with a far lower risk of inconsistency or treatment error. It also means that information can be used to make population-wide observations about patient groups for a specific hospital. In this regard, the ELS is well-established and successful way of promoting staff education specific to a given healthcare treatment context.

Additionally relevant is the Mayo Clinic's focus on the development of an Enterprise Information Technology Data Trust. The system would be designed to save and constantly update patient information so as to allow for an improved focus of health services. This information technology strategy and its attendant data protection are two dimensions of the May Clinic's operations that would be beneficial if replicated in other healthcare contexts.

Authority/Structure/Organization:

The Mayo Clinic is structured similarly to most major health systems. The major difference in the distribution of organizational power is in its current emphasis on Quality Improvement. The hierarchy defined here below in concise detail demonstrates this shift in focus:

Board of Directors: The Board of Directors takes responsibility for reviewing, approving and finalizing a quality improvement plan. This core of decision-makers would engage in discourse on the financial, capital investment, overall value and path of implementation of the Quality Improvement plan.

Executive Leadership: Executive leadership takes the vision promoted by the Board and implements it. Often, the executive leadership core will be comprised of leaders from different parts of an organization. In this case, this would include representatives of physicians, of clinicians, IT techs and members of the management team.

Quality Improvement Committee: Just as the Board of Directors dispatched executive leadership, so will executive leadership dispatch its Quality Improvement Committee, whose members are responsible for identifying areas of need and offering a path forward in satisfying that need.

The quality improvement committee is also setup by the executive leadership

Medical Staff: The medical staff is critical both as the channel for implementing organizational objectives and for providing valuable insight into the way that these objectives are being satisfied. Medical staff personnel will be equally as valuable in informing the needs for improvement as carrying out their strategies.

Middle Management: Middle management works as a liaison between medical staff and the leadership core found in both upper management and executive leadership. Middle management is responsible for providing directives and evaluating how well they are carried out.

Department Staff: The front-line staff at the Mayo Clinic, this population of personnel will be most directly responsible for carrying out the practical dimensions of the quality improvement plan.

Communication:

The hierarchy outlined here above denotes that there are a number of moving parts within the Mayo Clinic, as there are in any large-scale organization. It also denotes that these moving parts are highly interdependent and that interaction between them is what largely facilitates the achievement of intended goals. Therefore, communication is absolutely critical in promoting an efficient collaboration between the two. In order for the front-line and medical staffs to carry out their intended roles in the quality improvement plan, their responsibilities and the expectations before them must be presented with clarity.