EON Blog

If you’re a hands-on operational excellence practitioner or aspiring to become one, choosing your tactics for improvement efforts is probably where you start to get really excited. But wait! First, of course, you need to have your OpEx vision and strategy in place.  This includes identification of specific deliverables and metrics, the “what” that you are committing to achieve in working with teams of operational resources.

The road toward impactful, sustainable continuous improvement (CI) for most organizations will almost certainly contain potholes, roadblocks, and other hazards, which is why it’s crucial to take a thoughtful approach to how you introduce and deploy CI through the organization.  In our experience working with dozens of companies across multiple industries, we’ve gleaned a few insights into what separates organizations who “get it right” when it comes to CI from those who struggle to gain traction and make meaningful change.

Imagine trying to do a critical, life-in-the-balance job under extreme time pressure while hundreds of random strangers wander around your workplace asking too many questions and getting underfoot. It would be disconcerting to say the least. That is a worst-case perspective of having visitors in a healthcare facility.

The continuous improvement (CI) journey offers opportunities for achieving operational excellence, with significant enhancements to a company’s bottom line and enrichment of employee morale. It can, however, be fraught with frustration if the strategy and tactics for implementation are not clearly planned and communicated.

Doctor and patient communication has been ubiquitous in the American zeitgeist over many decades in the form of the empathetic bedside manner of television doctors. The likes of Marcus Welby (Marcus Welby, M.D.), J.D. Dorian (Scrubs) and Meredith Grey (Grey’s Anatomy) have modeled our ideal in their demonstration of care and communication with patients.

But what happens in the real world? A portion of doctor/patient communication comes from the personality of the physician or other healthcare provider. The larger part comes from the content of material that must be communicated and the trained skills of the communicator.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “A craftsman never blames his tools.”  It’s one that’s often repeated in circumstances where a person is projecting blame for a problem that he/she actually caused.  And there’s no doubt in my mind that there is significant truth in this adage (I’ve messed up more than one home repair project in which I wanted to blame the tools).  However, like many aphorisms that get thrown about nowadays, it’s likely to be misapplied on many occasions because the truth is there are occasions where the tool is actually the problem.

“All we want to do is help our patients, but what they don’t teach us in medical school is that there are so many ways to do harm.” I picked up that bit of wisdom on The Resident, a new medical show on Fox. In fact, a 2012 study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (a much more official source than any TV medical drama) reported: “More than one in four Medicare beneficiaries experience some degree of harm while hospitalized.” That’s a staggeringly large number.