Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) should
be an organization's ongoing and long term process,
whereby they continue to make improvements on
various metrics or measures within their organization.
Critically important pieces of any continuous
performance improvement initiative are: Transparency
and Accountability. Actions taken by a person
responsible for a measure's performance need
to be visible to anyone within the organization
who wants to view this information. This visibility
or transparency leads to accountability which
ultimately leads to quicker performance gains.
If everyone knows who is responsible for the
performance of a measure and that person's assessment
and actions are easily visible, then the magic
happens quicker.
Identifying Process Experts for an organization's
various metrics is critical to having successful
performance improvement initiatives. Process
Experts are responsible for measuring and monitoring
these key quality measures within the organization.
And, Process Experts are not typically statisticians;
they are the people who know the process and
can take charge of making improvements. It is
critical that they have easy-to-use tools that
will allow them to excel in their role as a
Process Expert.
Process Expert responsibilities include:
Looking at examples from the MIDAS+ Statit
Performance Indicator and Management Dashboard
(piMD™) application, we can see some of
the tools available to the Process Expert.
The Scorecard
The scorecard provides valuable status information
on our indicators. The green, yellow and red
"traffic lights" indicate the current
status of the indicator relative to its target
value. The red and green arrows indicate the
direction that the most recent data is moving,
either in a positive (green) or negative (red)
direction, compared to the previous period.
The check box icons are for indicators and data
that need to be validated by the indicator expert.
Data that has been validated will display just
the green check mark. Data that needs to be
validated will display the check mark in a red
box. Users can mouse over these icons to see
when the Process Expert last validated the data.
Note the SPC Alert column which indicates whether
the measure is currently experiencing unusual
variation given past performance. Users can
mouse over these to get a more detailed description.
Comments and Action Plans
When reviewing any control chart, comments and
action plans may be added in order to communicate
and track process improvement efforts. By simply
clicking on a data point, the Process Expert
can enter comments and/or action plans associated
with the measurement period that was selected.
These are then accessible to all users who have
access to this measure.
Process Phases
Statit piMD allows the Process Expert to identify
changes to the process for any given indicator.
A process phase represents a point in time where
a change was made to the process. Defining process
phases allows the expert to compare the "pre-process
change" to the "post-process change"
to determine if the change(s) had the desired
effect. Once the process change is identified,
Statit will automatically continue to perform
the statistical testing and update the visual
display to communicate whether the changes are
statistically significant as new data arrives
for the indicator.
Assignable Cause
It is ultimately the role of the Process Expert
to strive for quality on the process for which
they are responsible. Often times, there are
events that occur that are out of our control
and which affect the process, such as natural
disasters. These events, while they happen,
are often explainable causes for a process to
become out of control. We need to look past
these events in order to control our process.
While we do not want to lose sight of the event
occurring, the event should not have a statistical
impact on the monitoring of the process. A Process
Expert has the ability to define a given point
as an Assignable Cause, in order to identify
that point with an uncontrollable event.
Comparing Unit Performance
This is an excellent report for comparing multiple
departments, hospitals, units, etc. Using the
assumption that all the units should be performing
the same and taking volume into account, the
"Quality Status" column helps identify
those units that are performing statistically
different than the rest. The "red X"
shows those performing worse than the rest of
our hospitals and the "check mark"
shows those that are performing as we would
expect, within our control limits.
For more information on The Role of the Process
Expert, please view our view a webinar on
Successful
Performance Improvement Initiatives - The Role
of the Process Expert
Statit is here to help. If you would like to
learn more, give us a call at (541) 752-4500
or send us an email at
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