On the Road

As we come into the home stretch of 2011, we are on track to double the number of high- performing unit-based teams by December. It has us thinking about what structural elements exist in places we consistently find high-performing teams. We find that the facilities with the greatest number of high-performing teams have some consistent ingredients. Our recent visit to the Fresno Medical Center in Northern California demonstrated what facilities with lots of high-performing teams have in common.

Some of the brightest stars in the UBT constellation are at the San Diego Medical Center and its many satellite facilities. At a recent San Diego UBT fair, co-leads from departments throughout the medical center proudly displayed storyboards explaining their teams’ goals and their most up-to-date results on performance improvement. UBT fairs have truly become a best practice for sharing of ideas and allowing the people who do the work to explore with their fellow workers what’s working and what’s not.

We’re almost half way through 2011, and all the regions are helping their unit-based teams advance along the Path to Performance. This has not been the easiest of transitions—the process requires team co-leads and sponsors to agree on their team performance assessments, and on the interpretation of specific language in the Path to Performance document.

It was on one of our seven-and-a-half hour flights to Hawaii that we encountered a flight attendant who seemed to be suffering from either a lack of sleep, overwork or just the frustration and stress of a job whose fortunes have declined badly over the past 10 years.

We thought we were going to meet with 14 or 15 UBT co-leads from the Fontana Medical Center in Southern California for a discussion about unit-based teams. But when we pulled into the lot and couldn’t find a place to park, we became suspicious.

The Path to Performance has been on the minds of regional LMP co-leads, UBT consultants and sponsors recently as we finished gathering baseline data on high-performing teams. None of us were surprised, as we collapsed four different score cards and multiple criteria into a single system for rating team progress, by the decrease in the number of high-performing teams. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we reached agreement on the tool, and the process for the rating was unified and the data loaded in UBT tracker by January 14.

Once again we were lucky to share the experience of attending the annual Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) national conference. The conference attracts 6,000 people from around the world and another 15,000 people attending via satellite. It is the Disney World of innovation and learning about health care improvement and is, appropriately enough, held in Orlando, Florida, the first week of December.

Our travels took us to the beautiful island of Oahu to meet with some regional leaders and UBT co-leads. Their hospitality was outstanding and it is clear why Hawaii is called “paradise.”

The Hawaii region is the newest to join the Partnership and has the advantage of learning from the experience of other regions. In fact, some UBT consultants recently met with their colleagues in San Diego.

As we travel throughout the Kaiser Permanente regions we always leave with a question still unanswered: What changes someone’s thinking?

Behind that question are a multitude of others:

Every quarter we host a meeting of all the regional LMP co-leads, some senior unit-based team consultants, Kaiser Permanente leaders and their Union Coalition partners. The Sept. 28 and 29 meeting was held at the new hospital and medical offices in Irvine, California. The facilities are impressive.