Vila Health: Quality Assurance and Leadership

Ask at least one question.

Please describe the current relationship between quality improvement and the organization’s current strategic goals.

Hide Text

Nicholas Martinez - Chief Administrative Officer, Vila Health Corporate: Well, I’d say that relationship is not as strong as it needs to be. Improving it is one of the main objectives of our current efforts around re-examining our strategic goals. Let me give you an example – one of our strategic goals for the past five years has been to increase our presence in suburban and rural communities within the states where we currently have a presence. We’ve done very well with that, but the acquisitions we’ve made have all had their own strategic goals and their own quality improvement programs. For the most part, we’ve overlaid our strategic goals onto these new entities, but their Quality Improvement programs have not generally been reviewed from that perspective.

Geoffrey Vaughn – Chief Executive Officer, SAMC: Specific to St. Anthony Medical Center, I’d say that both our strategic planning and our quality improvement have been forward thinking and integral parts of our organizational culture. But… they have been siloed and that’s meant that, quite frankly, the right hand hasn’t always known what the left was doing. We’re working on changing that. In fact, that’s the reason you’ve been brought in. We need a solid strategy for integrating the two and using best practices and solid leadership strategies in the process.

Blake Carter – Director of IT, Vila Health Corporate: One contributor to the disconnect between quality improvement and strategic planning has been the ways in which we utilize data. Quality improvement has been around since the forties, but healthcare has traditionally been lagging in its willingness to use QI to drive improvements. Why this is could be debated for hours. However, change is happening and we’re seeing much more openness to meaningful changes. What makes the difference is data. Physicians are an excellent example of that. You want to get physicians on board with the need to make a change – show them the data that supports your plan. But there you see the crucial element. We need to be using data to make our decisions.

Jackie Sandoval – Chief Nursing Officer, SAMC: We have a strong nursing strategic plan and one of the strengths of it is the specificity. There are three areas of focus – Patient Focus, Nursing Excellence, and Nursing Leadership – and within each of those are specific goals. That specificity allows us to keep the quality improvement efforts closely aligned to the strategic goals. So … in that regard we’re doing well. Where we could make these efforts even stronger would be to make sure it’s clear how the nursing goals align to St. Anthony’s overall strategic goals.

How are analytics and data being leveraged to better understand quality improvement? Hide Text

Nicholas Martinez - Chief Administrative Officer, Vila Health Corporate: Data analytics are going to be an integral part of how we move forward. If we want to make the right decisions the first time, we’ll need good analytics to identify the priorities for quality improvement efforts. Once we’ve done that, we’re going to need analytics to measure and track our progress.

Blake Carter – Director of IT, Vila Health Corporate: One of the first projects we’re implementing will be to coordinate with stakeholders to ensure they’re getting the information and data they need when they need it. Fine tuning the dashboards and other reports that leaders receive will help to integrate real time information with the quality improvement efforts. Stakeholders will know whether efforts are working much faster and will be able to respond accordingly.

Jackie Sandoval – Chief Nursing Officer, SAMC: This is where that specificity I mentioned comes in. Most of the nursing strategic goals are linked to specific outcomes – infection reduction efforts or skin care protocols – the goals have specific targets, such as reducing falls with harm to below .75%. Timely data is going to be crucial to all our initiatives.

Geoffrey Vaughn – Chief Executive Officer, SAMC: One thing we will need to keep in mind is that data alone isn’t a cure-all – no pun intended. We have a good … no, a great – infrastructure, but we also need to work with the data analytics team to ensure we’re asking the right questions and looking at the data for insights we didn’t think to ask about.

How do leadership and teambuilding practices factor into quality improvement efforts? View Text

00:41 | 02:14

 







 Back Continue 

     