This is an exciting time for Stamford Hospital. We’re in the midst of building a brand-new facility, and we are very fortunate to be in a financial situation where we are able to do this.
Creating a new hospital opened the door to a new, more innovative organizational culture
What we realized during this time of expansion is that this is a great opportunity to examine our current processes and look at how we can improve safety, optimize the patient experience and increase the efficiency of our staff.
We also saw an equally important opportunity to create and implement an innovative, more efficient work-flow redesign. So in many ways, from the way it looks to the way it functions, the new Stamford Hospital really will be new.
Transitioning from one healthcare facility to the next led to an examination of the overall patient experience
To successfully carry out these improvements and keep us on track, we established several goals early on in the process.
First, we developed a comprehensive, interdepartmental implementation plan for the transition to the new facility. Next, we used the new design, along with our guiding principles, to identify tactics, interdependencies, deliverables, responsibilities and timelines to meet key project milestones. And last but not least, we identified important organizational rituals and events that needed to continue to be part of the new hospital’s culture, and also planned how to safeguard that culture during the transition.
Lean Six Sigma processes helped hospital leadership understand healthcare customers’ needs and ways to bring about increased satisfaction
Throughout our process of determining how to improve our current workflow, we have been using many of the Lean Six Sigma processes—management tools for setting objectives, collecting data, and analyzing results in order to reduce costs, eliminate waste, understand customer needs, increase customer satisfaction and enhance performance. Specifically at Stamford Hospital, these processes have revealed ways we can better serve our patients, follow protocols and improve the way we operate.
In fact, members of our Lean Six Sigma team played an instrumental part in the initial design of the new building. The team will now shift from Lean Facility Design to Lean Process Design, where multi-disciplinary teams will assess our current process flows, design ideal future ones, and identify gaps in optimizing the patient experience.
How to truly achieve hospital innovation? Involve your entire healthcare staff and welcome their input
As I wrote in my previous blog, we’ll be heavily engaging Stamford Hospital staff in all of our process-evaluation work. They are the ones who often have the best ideas on how to improve the patient experience. I firmly believe that if you listen to them, if you bring them into a room with experts on process and workflow and the Lean theories, it can significantly help you improve everything you do as a healthcare organization.
Change may be hard, but in Stamford Hospital’s case, change is going great!
The information contained in this blog represents the personal views of the contributor, and is not intended to reflect the opinions or position of any other contributor or organization.
