Despite their best efforts and intentions, provider organizations today struggle to achieve their quality and outcomes goals. The underlying reasons for this shortfall are not rooted in a lack of dedication or goodwill, but rather in the constant need for leaders to extinguish fires that divert their attention from quality improvement initiatives. Below are four ways provider organizations can “fire-proof” their quality efforts: 

1. Hardwire quality responsibilities across your organization. While all leaders acknowledge the importance of quality, only a few truly center their strategic and operational efforts around it. In some cases, the responsibility for quality is solely allocated to one leader, which limits the sense of ownership and accountability among the entire executive team. Alternatively, quality goals may be diffuse across departments and lack clear ownership, leading to misalignment and variation within the system across different departments and facilities. By delegating quality responsibilities across the executive team and establishing clear ownership of quality goals across departments, provider organizations can foster a culture of ownership and accountability, inspiring a shared commitment to quality.

2. Move away from one-off quality improvement campaigns to ensure sustained, long-term progress on patient outcomes. Firstly, it is important to integrate quality improvement efforts across the entire system, rather than confining them to individual facilities or units. This way, leaders can avoid duplicating efforts. Secondly, implementing too many initiatives simultaneously can overwhelm clinicians and hinder their ability to focus effectively. Prioritizing and pacing the introduction of initiatives ensures that attention and resources are dedicated to each opportunity. Lastly, to maintain momentum, it is crucial to go beyond raising awareness and instead implement structural and procedural changes that embed the desired improvements into workflows. This approach ensures lasting change and continuous progress in quality and safety.

3. Prioritize change management instead of over-emphasizing the development of the perfect care standard. Many organizations struggle to translate care standards into daily practice, making it difficult to scale efforts to improve quality across multiple units and facilities. When we ask leaders to diagnose why they are struggling to embed quality standards, they most often cite two barriers: clinician resistance or limited bandwidth. While these are both common barriers, they are both symptoms of a greater problem: care standards are often designed without workflow in mind. Rather than solely focusing on creating the perfect care standard, leaders should also consider the practical aspects of workflow integration. By incorporating workflow considerations into the design of care standards, frontline caregivers will find them more user-friendly, leading to increased utilization of the protocols.

4. Invest in data management capabilities to streamline quality data collection and assessment. By streamlining and optimizing the infrastructure for data collection and reporting, healthcare organizations can alleviate the burden on clinicians. Additionally, providing clarity on the relevance and necessity of these metrics in improving patient outcomes will help clinicians understand their importance. Furthermore, facilitating seamless sharing of patient data and care information with other systems and providers will enable effective collaboration and coordination of care. By addressing these challenges, healthcare organizations can empower clinicians to accurately assess and enhance healthcare quality.

These four steps represent critical areas that demand attention and improvement yet are often overlooked amid the chaos of daily operations. By addressing them head-on, organizations can pave the way for a healthcare system that consistently meets and exceeds its quality goals.

Read the following publications to learn tactics to fire-proof your quality efforts:
 

• How to right-size organizational commitment to CVR
• Create Care Standards Your Front Line Will Embrace
• Toolkit for Building Implementation-Ready Care Standards
• From Theory to Practice: Integrating Standards of Care Across Your Organisation
• How Cigna cut their quality measures from 101 to 17