Quality

• Reporting weekly on staff engagement with patients
• Training and peer-to-peer coaching of staff
• Educating physicians on awareness

What can your team do to leverage KP's unique tools for prevention to keep patients healthy? 

• Increasing training and teamwork to ensure accuracy of the data
• Working with regional subject-matter experts, and creatng a reference tool for self-review
• Conducting daily department-wide and self-audits to catch mistakes

What can your team do to build quality control into your workflow? 

• Identifying eligible members for colorectal screening
• Developing a personalized story for each patient to make it relevant
• Creating a follow-up process to ensure patients are following through with the test

What can your team do to customize your outreach to patients?

• Reducing cancer IV medication waste
• Scheduling back-to-back, same-day appointments
• Using smaller vials

 What can your team do to consolidate resources and improve efficiency?

• Reducing the use of butterfly needles
• Assessing when it’s sufficient to use a standard needle
• Allowing phlebotomists to self-monitor

What can your team do to use your resources more efficiently? What else could your team do to reduce waste? 

Kaiser Permanente is a leader in multiple measures of clinical quality — and unit-based teams are a key to that success. Partnering together in high-performing teams, frontline workers, managers and physicians are improving patient access, expanding preventive care and increasing patient safety.

• Identifying departments that send patients and specimens without orders
• Using a playful law enforcement theme to educate the “violators”
• Monitoring data and recognizing departments that are improving

What can your team do to approach a serious issue in a more playful way? What else could your team do to help "violators" change without blame?

• Hosting a short-term special clinic for post-transplant patients, enabling them to get all their follow-up care in one visit
• Creating an Excel spreadsheet of post-transplant patients and their follow-up needs
• Making outreach calls to patients with care gaps

What can your team do to fill patient care gaps? What else could your team do to proactively meet patient needs?

• Collaborating on “hand-off” messages between Physical Therapy and nursing staff
• Writing specific messages about daily therapy sessions on a board in the patient’s room
• Standardizing information placed on the boards

What can your team do to encourage better communication between team members?

• Creating a wait list for patients who need to schedule surgeries
• Assigning a full-time employee to manage the wait list
• Using openings in the schedule to squeeze in emergency patients

What can your team do to improve patient satisfaction and efficiencies in your department? What else could your team do to relieve scheduling backlogs?