Vila Health: Quality Assurance and Leadership

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? Hide Text

Nicholas Martinez - Chief Administrative Officer, Vila Health Corporate: I think one of the important things is going to be to ensure that the executive leadership is on board. We can’t just be talking the talk – workers need to see that we’re committed to quality improvement efforts.

Geoffrey Vaughn – Chief Executive Officer, SAMC: It’s also important that we look at the specific initiative and work with all the stakeholders – front line clinical staff, business stakeholders, whomever … and ensure that the team assembled is the right team and the approach taken to accomplish the goals is the right approach. This sounds simplistic, perhaps, but what’s important is that we’re not trying to tackle 21st century problems with 20th century approaches. We need to do the research and make sure that we identify the risks and potential obstacles and account for them.

Jackie Sandoval – Chief Nursing Officer, SAMC: From my perspective, making sure that the right people are part of the conversation is important. This might mean creating information gathering teams to identify issues, or it might mean ensuring that nurse voices are at the table when we're planning initiatives and not just when a “solution” has been decided.

Blake Carter – Director of IT, Vila Health Corporate: Again, making sure that we’re working with whatever team you’re talking about to ensure they have the IT resources they need and that they know how to leverage them. So, that won’t just be us coming in and setting up software on a workstation, but instead being in the early conversations and being part of the innovation and brainstorming of what’s needed and what’s possible.

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