The overall success of a medical facility is determined by the quality of healthcare it provides. If healthcare quality is poor, an organization’s customer satisfaction and performance can decrease. In the example of the Kirkland facility, patients had to wait a long time to get treatment and eventually, were dissatisfied with their doctors. However, the actions of Virginia Mason have resuscitated ambulatory care.
Minor Changes
Virginia Mason encountered various challenges with a shortage of room for providing ambulatory surgery, as the center was operating on its limits. Besides longer waiting times for patients, the conditions for recovery were also unfavorable. Virginia Mason realized that a traditional ambulatory care model does not meet the expectations and requires radical changes (Kenney, 2011). The objectives were to provide better healthcare, patient flow and to optimize physicians’ workload. Exploring one particular doctor in the clinic led to experimenting with different schedules and styles. As a result, the study concluded that completing modest amounts of paperwork between patient visits was more efficient than addressing all paperwork at the end of the day. The patient satisfaction rate regarding phone access rose from 40% to 85% (Bhattacharyya et al., 2018).
Major Changes
Moreover, the technique of listening to patients was introduced to improve the quality of ambulatory care. The collected feedback from patients was split into categories of family involvement, decreasing the number of handoffs, and enhancing privacy. The medical center has improved customer satisfaction and healthcare quality by utilizing these processes. To tackle the issue of the room shortage, Virginia Mason has implemented a strategy of setup reduction (Kenney, 2011). They have optimized the room utilization and capacity by analyzing the aspects of ambulatory care that must be done inside the room, as some preparations were performed outside rooms.
The breakthrough was achieved due to various actions. The experiment that found a style of splitting tasks into smaller pieces increased workflow optimization. Ambulatory care was improved by implementing a patient-centered approach to maximize the patient’s comfort. Lastly, decreasing setups has improved the efficiency of rooms, as preparations were done outside the surgical rooms.
References
Kenney, C. (2011). Transforming health care (1st ed.). Taylor and Francis.
Bhattacharyya, O., Blumenthal, D., Stoddard, R., Mansell, L., Mossman, K., & Schneider, E. (2018). Redesigning care: Adapting new improvement methods to achieve person-centred care. BMJ Quality &Amp; Safety, 28(3), 242-248. Web.