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Developing A Standard Discharge Process at Northgate Medical Center
Cluster A, whose servant-leaders are Sarah Levy, MD, and Sherry Sardona, MA, is developing a standard discharge process for when patients are concluding their appointments. Cluster A, one of the six clusters at Northgate Medical Center, has about 15 people working in it, including 7 providers. The group has decided that developing such a discharge [...]
Removing Burdens More Important Than Removing Waste
My two manager partners– Malathi Michael and Jacqui Davis — and I decided yesterday that we liked the term BURDEN more than WASTE when working on clinic improvement using Lean principles. Though these terms can be used interchangeably, our staff are more likely to recognize that we want to help them if we focus on [...]
Frontline Improvement, Northgate Medical Center: Hard Copy Missing at Pharmacy!
Hey Northgate! It’s been a great experience working on the design team so far and attempting to improve many of the problematic processes around the clinic. That being said, I am curious how things have been going on the test team’s end of things? Any comments or suggestions? Problem: When patient is not in clinic, provider [...]
Current List Front Line Improvement Ideas, Northgate
Kristi said to me last week, “Hey, Marty, can we see the list of improvement ideas that the frontline improvement design team is using?” I told Kristi I’d post it on the blog so the whole clinic could see it. The team meets tomorrow and will likely pick a new problem to tackle. External referrals [...]
What is a Good “After Visit Summary?”
Background Our electronic medical record allows providers to type after visit summaries (AVS) for patients that are printed off and given to patients when they leave. I see tremendous variation in the quality of these after visit summaries. Because we do not have established standards for the construction of the AVS, it is not surprising to [...]
Design Team, Frontline Improvement, Northgate Medical Center
What is Frontline Improvement at Northgate Medical Center? For work to be fun and engaging for staff, staff need to be able to improve their work processes regularly. The Frontline Improvement Campaign at Northgate Medical Center supports this kind of culture. In Frontline Improvement, a small design team with representatives from disciplines across the clinic [...]
Frontline Improvement Northgate Medical Center: Patient Stuck at Pharmacy Window!
Problem: Patient stuck at pharmacy window because pharmacy staff has a question for provider and cannot dispense medication until question answered. Process Mapping & Observations: No standard procedure existed for the pharmacy staff member to follow to solve this problem. Each time the problem occurred, the pharmacy staff member would try whatever made sense at [...]
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes (photo in post)
Today at the Northshore Medical Center the Front Line Improvement (FLI) team set about discussing the sticky issue of change. They have been doing small team-based improvements for a couple months now and having a lot of fun! Not surprisingly this has brought up conversation around change because every experiment they run represents some level [...]
Evidence-Based Baseball
I was at a conference in June and ran into a doctor from Boston who suggested I read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, a 2004 nonfiction book about baseball. He thought it would influence the way I think about health care. Because baseball and health care are exactly the same, right? I like baseball so, I read [...]
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