Rising costs, uneven quality and mounting regulatory pressures have characterized the healthcare community for years. While long-term solutions still remain something of a pipe dream, an increasing number of healthcare professionals and institutions are turning to Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma as an approach that can make a big difference.
Twenty years ago, the industry was just beginning to learn about methodologies focused on performance improvement. In the last five years, however, they have become quite common in hospital clinical units.
Today, Six Sigma is proving its worth at medical schools, rural clinics, public health departments, rehab facilities, outpatient surgery centers, primary care and dental practices. It’s showing the way to improvement everywhere from patient satisfaction to finance and supply chain operations – and often driving cultural transformation in the process.
Organizations that have made the most of Six Sigma have brought about a major change in how they think to make it work. Healthcare is not an arena where operational effectiveness has been measured with any great rigor. That has changed as healthcare leaders recognize the universality of processes – whatever the setting.
Thus, it’s become an option to the cost-reduction-by-layoff that’s typically employed in the sector. As author Mark Graban (Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement) told Strategic Planning magazine: “Lean views cost as better safety and patient flow. If you reduce your lab time, you can release your patient faster, which improves your payment.”
Experts like Graban believe Six Sigma has the potential to create a return on investment for hospitals of up to 50%. Streamlining clinical processes alone have a big impact – reducing costs while improving quality. Even facilitating several more operations or paring hospital stays by a few hours can have an impact in the millions of dollars.
These two cases help drive home the point:
Improving Pain Management at LDS Hospital
LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, aligned with the University of Utah School of Medicine, undertook a Six Sigma initiative to address patient issues with pain management in its emergency department. Pain – or alleviating it – is a primary reason why people seek emergency care, but patient complaints were escalating about how slowly pain was addressed.
Two goals marked the initiative: Increasing the rate at which pain treatment was administered and reducing the time it took to administer it. The team conducted a pain management audit and found that pain treatment was subject to many processes before it was administered – none of which held intrinsic patient value.
The feedback led to an educational initiative around pain management, while suggestions on ways to trim the processes and reduce the time it took to administer treatment were solicited. At the same time, the team drove through a cultural change marked by intolerance for untreated pain.
The effort yielded tangible results, as a repeat pain management audit revealed: Time to pain management declined to 46 minutes from 67. Complaints of untreated pain dropped to 11% from 39% – all while LDS realized improved patient satisfaction scores.
How Six Sigma Optimized Diagnostic Imaging Services at Carle
The Carle Foundation Hospital in central Illinois is among the many healthcare organizations to be challenged to keep up with faster, smarter technologies from a skills and workflow perspective. Despite the technological evolution, processes surrounding diagnostic imaging services have not kept up.
To increase capacity and raise patient satisfaction, Carle launched a Six Sigma initiative aimed at improving cycle times for CT exams. The team’s analysis studied the processes involved how they affected the exam scheduling process. Among the changes put into place:
- Contrast solution was administered earlier to ensure patients were ready for the exam on time.
- The MRI IV start room was used to prep CT patients.
- The technology available to staff was expanded with chart, requisition and file room improvements.
The improvements did more than improve patient satisfaction with the CT exam experience. It also improved the predictability of the process. And, from a quantitative perspective, the improvements increased CT capacity by six exams daily, with an annual financial potential of approximately $390,000.
