Improvements don’t “just happen.” They are guided by quality professionals who know how to motivate people and direct the efforts. 101 Tools for Improving Health Care Performance is a toolbox of interventions that will help you accelerate positive change in your organization. The experienced authors provide the field-tested tools you need to handle a host of performance issues. Don't worry about how to face improvement challenges in your organization. Just grab your toolbox and go! This book has the interventions you need to be successful.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section 1: Performance Measurement and Assessment

1. Advancing Performance Excellence
2. Blueprint for an Outcomes Management Study
3. Creating Performance Report Cards
4. Do You Have Good Performance Measures
5. Do Your Core Values Support Performance Excellence?
6. Evaluating Your Metrics
7. How to Create a Valuable Balanced Scorecard
8. Improve Measurement Data Collection Strategies
9. Learn from Patient Cycle Times
10. Performance Measurement Plan
11. Physician Profiles
12. Reacting to Performance Data
13. Time-Value Chart
14. Visioning Statement and Gap Analysis

    Section 2: Performance Improvement

15. Action Planning for Success
16. Avoid Taught Helplessness
17. Benchmarking Tips & Traps
18. Causal Loop Diagrams
19. Change Impact Analyzer
20. Clarify Your Power Base
21. Contingency Planning
22. Corrective Action Paper Trails
23. Cost/Benefit Considerations
24. Cycle Time Reduction (Lean) Check Sheet
25. Develop the Case for Change
26. Fifteen Steps to a Clinical Path
27. From Action Plan Through Implementation: Getting it Right
28. Hindsight is Foresight
29. Identify Relationships
30. Improvement Planning
31. Improvement Project Charters
32. Improvement Project Request
33. Improvement Project Status Reports
34. Is / Is Not
35. Mapping Patient Care Processes
36. Overcome the Action Implementation “Killers"
37. Process Improvement Methodology
38. Red Tag Day
39. Seven Levels of Getting Better
40. So What-Why-How Tool
41. Solution Session
42. Start with the Low Hanging Fruit
43. Task Transfer Between Departments
44. Team Member Selection Criteria
45. Template for Departmental Performance Improvement Plans
46. Three’s Company
47. Top 10 Questions for Creating an AIM Statement
48. Using 10 Tips to Draw Out Best Practices
49. What Do You See?
50. What’s In It For Me?
51. When Improvements Don’t Go As Planned

    Section 3: Customer Service

52. Customer Service Commitment Card
53. Envisioning World Class Service
54. Moments of Truth Score Card
55. Service Improvement Tool
56. Tune-Up Your Service Awareness
57. Turning Lemons into Lemonade

    Section 4: Patient Safety

58. Can You Hear Me Now?
59. Compliance/Noncompliance
60. Declare War on Errors and Defects
61. Dig into the Cause of Errors
62. FMEA Process Analysis Survey
63. It’s the Culture!
64. Knock Out Errors with Visual Controls
65. Negative Problem Solving
66. Progress Tracking of Incident Investigations
67. Root Cause Analysis Template
68. Step-By-Step FMEA
69. Strengthen Critical Human Actions
70. Visual Control Mechanisms
71. Warning Signs of Unsafe Equipment
72. What-If Analysis
73. What’s Your Patient Safety Policy?
74. Why Did the Safeguards Fail?

    Section 5: Group Process and Teaming

75. Better Safe Than Sorry
76. Change is
77. Drivers and Diluters
78. Feather-Like Vision
79. Getting Staff Ideas to Flow
80. Great/Better Insights and Team Partnerships
81. Harnessing Conflict
82. High-Performing Ground Rules
83. Hot Wash-Up
84. Lessons From “The Hoop"
85. Migrate from Can’t to Can
86. Monitoring Team Health
87. Post-it Brainstorming
88. Radar Screen
89. Sharing-Passport
90. Six Thinking Hats
91. Team Member Performance Evaluation
92. Top 10 Facilitation Roles
93. Top 10 Tips for Running a Great Team Meeting
94. Upside-Down Problem Solving

    Section 6: Personal Growth

95. Carefrontation
96. Forty Things To Be
97. How About Some Non-Defensive Listening
98. Ten Commandments of Networking
99. Uncluttered Your Workplace
100. Ways to Think About Your Thinking
101. What Have I Learned? How Will I Use It?

     About the Authors:

     Duke Rohe has been involved in health care improvement for thirty years. He is an industrial engineer by degree and a creator by nature. Duke is a Fellow member of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society and has received its Total Quality Management Award and its Outstanding Fellow Service Award. He authored the chapter “Instigating Change and Engaging Teams” in the society’s Management Engineering Handbook. Duke is currently a systems improvement specialist at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in the Texas Medical Center (Houston). He considers himself the improvement geek for accelerated change at the hospital. His creation of improvement tools began as a commitment to generate a tool a week and share it with change masters in his organization. He expanded distribution of his tools outside the organization by developing two web sites: http://www.himsssct.org/tools/tools.html and http://shs.iienet.org. Several of his more popular tools have been formalized for inclusion in this book.

     Patrice L. Spath is a health information management professional with extensive experience in performance management activities. During the past 25 years Patrice has presented over 350 training programs on quality improvement, utilization management, patient safety, and outcomes management topics. Patrice has authored several books for her own publishing company, Brown-Spath & Associates, and for other publishers such as the American Hospital Association, Health Administration Press, and OR Manager, Inc. Patrice writes the monthly "Quality-Cost Connection" column for Hospital Peer Review and serves as a quarterly guest columnist for Hospital Case Management.