Business statistics What might be the key processes for heal

Business statistics

What might be the key processes for health-care organizations?

What are the potential common causes of variation that would have an impact on the key processes of health-care organizations?

What special causes might be more important than the others?

How might health-care organizations’ business environment be dynamic and change over time?

Solution

health care organizations from the US and Europe designed, tested, and implemented changes in strategy, structure, and key processes, supported by IHI faculty and with frequent contact with each other in a collaborative learning model.

Pursuing Perfection Goals
The Pursuing Perfection initiative challenged hospitals and physician organizations to improve patient outcomes dramatically by “pursuing perfection” in all major care processes. Pursuing perfection meant striving to:

Our extensive experience in working with healthcare managers has taught us that their primary goal is to maintain and improve the quality of care processes and outcomes for groups of patients. Ongoing care and its improvement are temporal, so in their situation, learning from variation over time is essential. Data are organised over time to answer the fundamental management question: is care today as good as or better than it was in the past, and how likely is it to be better tomorrow? In answering that question, it becomes crucial to understand the difference between common-cause and special-cause variation (as will be discussed later). Common-cause variation appears as random variation in all measures from healthcare processes.1 Special-cause variation appears as the effect of causes outside the core processes of the work. Management can reduce this variation by enabling the easy recognition of special-cause variation and by changing healthcare processes—by supporting the use of clinical practice guidelines, for example—but common-cause variation can never be eliminated.

Special-cause variation is characterised by:

Special-cause variation always arrives as a surprise. It is the signal within a system.