Hospitals often neglect the patient management systems when it comes to reforming healthcare. Leaders working at reputed hospitals across the country like US are working hard on adding cost and cutting waste and enhancing quality of care and patient satisfaction. Team members are trying their best to improve health care at their places in several ways, including emergency room waits, a balloon angioplasty, the reducing number of patients readmitted to hospitals within 30 days of discharge, the time between a heart attack, etc.
Still, the ardent reformers are not having the management system to support their goals. What is worse is that the old conventional management-by-objective systems often used to undermine all of the great works by those frontline improvement teams.
In this 21st century, if managers achieve their targeted objectives, they get reward. The objectives that do not met by them result in loss of demotion, stature, or even firing. Data sharing is often considered as more harmful thing that doesn’t help.
Success starts with defining clear goals, the few metrics that are necessary for enhancing patient care and establishing the core principles that drive new systems. This is a management-by-process system that requires leaders to know how care is provided to patients. The system also helps leader to lead frontline caregivers in enhancing those processes daily.
Most processes are regulated by standardized work including routine management activities.
The healthcare organizations that have started using management by process provide training to every leader- from shift supervisor to senior doctors- to lead their teams in problem solving using the scientific method. In this scenario, managers and executives are not the one who solves the problems as they are trained to facilitate problem solving by those that best know what work.
At every management level, leaders assist in creating their own standard work. Let’s take an instance of middle managers, who make the rounds of their direct reports each morning. Say, status sheet that contains questions that executives and managers ask when they go to a place of work. Then the manager meets with the team working at frontline to coordinate problem solving and improvement activities prior meeting with her own superior to discuss the things.
Patient management system is designed to help management of healthcare in problem solving. They can follow sound strategy and deal with the everyday problems in right way.
