Profs Do Book To Help Hospitals Improve
 |
Authors, from left,
Jo Ann Duffy, Gerald Kohers, Vic Sower. |
Sam Houston State University may not have a medical school,
but three of its College of Business Administration faculty
members can tell you a lot about how to run a hospital.
Vic Sower, Jo Ann Duffy and Gerald Kohers found out that,
for various reasons, patient satisfaction with hospitals is
falling. So they wrote a book to help solve some of their
problems through use of a management concept called "benchmarking."
Sower said that "benchmarking" is nothing more than
a process in which an organization measures its strategies,
operations, or internal process performance against best-in-class
organizations within or even outside its industry.
The book is called Benchmarking for Hospitals: Achieving
Best-in-Class Performance Without Having to Reinvent the Wheel.
Sower, Duffy and Kohers all teach in the management and marketing
department in the College of Business Administration. They
found that while hospitals don't need to re-invent the wheel,
watching how racing crews change them can improve hospital
operations.
Sower said that the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London,
England, earned top ratings from their Healthcare Commission
as the result of an idea that came to two tired surgeons who
were watching a Formula 1 race.
"They noticed how choreographed the pit crew operations
were," said Sower. "They had recently determined
that many of the errors in their hospital were occurring during
handoff from the operating room to the intensive care unit.
They both hit on the idea of benchmarking the Ferrari Racing
Crew's pit stop procedure to improve their handoff procedure."
In order to come up with their exemplary organization profiles,
the SHSU authors did site visits to three of the five hospitals
featured, conducted numerous hours of interviews either in
person or by phone, and studied data provided by the hospitals.
Three of the hospitals have won the Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award, which is the highest in the United States.
Other awards include the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals, Child
magazine's 10 Best U. S. Children's Hospitals, the Leapfrog
Top Hospitals, and U. S. News & World Report's America's
Best Hospitals.
The featured hospitals and their special areas of expertise
include:
- Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, Mich., which
has a registered nurse turnover rate of 4.7 percent compared
to a national average of 18 percent;
- Columbus Children's Hospital (now Nationwide Children's
Hospital) in Columbus, Ohio, which has gone two years without
a surgical error;
- Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Hamilton, N.
J., which guarantees that an emergency room patient will
be seen by a nurse within 15 minutes of arrival and by a
doctor within 30 minutes, or treatment is free;
- North Mississippi Health Services, with headquarters in
Tupelo, Miss., computer networking its doctors for better
communication and accessibility; and
- Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, England, Formula
I pit crew efficiency in emergency room to intensive care
transfer.
Sower said the idea for the book was the result of the 2006
Press Ganey Report that showed that the "gap in patient
satisfaction is widening between hospitals that deliver exemplary
patient service and those that provide lower levels of care."
The book is available from the American Society for Quality's
Quality Press online at http://www.asq.org/quality-press.
Its ISBN is 978-0-87389-722-8 and ASQ item number is H1314.
Its cost is $52.50, or $31.50 for ASQ members.
—END—
SHSU Media Contact: Frank
Krystyniak
March 28, 2008
Please send comments, corrections, news tips to Today@Sam.edu.
|
