How do you ensure that your quality improvement initiatives are sustainable and scalable?

Beyond its practical benefits, defining a clear goal and selecting appropriate measures for your QI initiative serves as a catalyst for organizational alignment and cultural transformation. By aligning your goal with the organization's vision, mission, and values, you create a shared sense of purpose and direction. This alignment fosters a culture of collaboration, engagement, and continuous improvement. When stakeholders see that their needs and expectations are being considered and addressed through the QI initiative, it enhances their confidence in the organization and its commitment to their well-being. It creates a sense of inclusivity and shared responsibility, which in turn leads to increased buy-in, participation, and ownership

What we don’t measure doesn’t improve . What we measure doesn’t have to be extreme measures of change. People are resistant to change. We need to provide a long time horizon with the vision of why the changes need to be done and how it not only benefits the organization but also will impact their home life too. An example is addressing toxic behaviors with managers or integrating a new system.

In my experience, effective quality improvement projects are those that are tailored to populations and situations in need. They are successful when their primary goal is to improve the quality of patient care.

We need to keep people: involved, informed, and interested. This level of engagement must be executed and modeled from the C-Suite for it to trickle down throughout the organization. Initiatives a CEO should consider for engagement with their team and stakeholders.Have teams make decisions not individuals. This feedback allows for different perspectives and is a catalyst for diversity and inclusivity responses.Have employee engagements outside of working hours, teams that operate as a family and less as coworkers have better collaboration. People want to be heard, validated, and respected in their roles. Having a mentorship program where leaders train employees who show interest in a different role or higher-level role.

Unlock the full potential of QI by embracing the transformative power of team engagement and stakeholder involvement. QI thrives on collaboration, drawing from the diverse perspectives and expertise of a multidisciplinary team. Involving stakeholders such as patients, staff, managers, leaders, and partners is key to driving meaningful change. From inception to evaluation, empower your team and stakeholders by actively engaging them in the QI process. Their input and insights can shape the initiative's direction, enhance its implementation, and ensure its sustainability. By fostering open communication, transparency, and trust, you cultivate a culture of shared accountability and continuous improvement. Together, you forge a unified force.

Once the quality improvement intiatives and related processes are implemented, a company or organization must then institute feedback loops with the managers and supervisors involved. The new initiatives must be monitored and key metrics must be agreed upon and introduced which gauge the success of the changes. Things to consider regarding the quality improvement changes are: -How much is this adding to operating costs or maybe it is saving money, in which case how much is it saving? -How much additional time is this adding to the production process or service time or maybe it is saving time. If so, how much? How can extra time be utilized? -How is this additional workload affecting your workforce or is it making the job easier for them?

It is imperative to demonstrate to stakeholders the significance of the quality improvement project. Once they comprehend the purpose of the project, they are more likely to follow along with the process.

What Drew is referring to here is Continuous Quality Improvement / Six Sigma. The overarching goal of Six Sigma is to reduce variance in outcomes by using data and statistical methods to improve system performance. This data should be incorporated into a type of management dashboard to base key operations and maybe even strategic decisions off of. The key is to identify these errors and/or flaws in process before it snowballs into major product defects necessitating recalls, customer harm or death due to defects [and resultant lawsuits], damage to company reputation, and loss of business partners and contracts. Some years back I read about a medical device company that failed to sterilize catheter wires and were used on patients - Recalled!

The QI tools are able to identity the deficits and implement as frame work that will establish a road map for accountability and action. Many times operations are not frequently audited and not changed or refined to meet demand. Auto drive on subpar operations breeds comfort but is poison. The cure is identifying the errors either in the people or process and revamp with proven successful techniques and strategies.

Tools like the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle can be advantageous for the follow-up of the project. The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is a quality improvement tool that can be used to test and implement changes in healthcare settings. -It is a four-step process that involves planning a change, implementing the change, observing the results, and acting on what was learned from the observation. -It is an iterative process that can be repeated until the desired outcome is achieved.

According to Aristotle, "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Given this, quality managers must examine and assess every area where QI can be implemented from manufacturing to customer service and everywhere in between. At the end of the day it's about the customer experience with your product or service. With that, it's imperative that a manager collect data which tells the story of the customer experience with the changes. That experience is what drives the perception of your product/service/company. So spread and scale accordingly.

I recently spoke with a CFO of a 100+ million dollar company, he stated he struggled with change in the organization, and agreed with my statement that the organization was stagnant and not conducive for change. Changes are easy in organization, but transformation is a tedious process with many moving parts.