Part 1: Create a flowchart (See Lesson) of the process that was discussed in the first meeting (see packet 1) to illustrate the workflow that is currently being used. This will help the team decide where there may be problems in the current workflow.
Information for part 1: (College Community Hospital (CCH) is a 200-bed facility offering adult medical, surgical, orthopedic, and psychiatric care. The hospital provides a full range of diagnostic and therapeutic services, including CT and MRI scanning and an eight-bed intensive care unit. The 200 beds are distributed over six inpatient floors:
3A Acute Medicine
3B Diagnostic Medicine
3C Intensive Care
4A Acute Psychiatry
4B Orthopedics
4C General Surgery
One year ago, faced with decreased patient and staff satisfaction and rising costs, the management of CCH adopted a Total Quality Management strategy. They formed a Quality Council and chartered several performance improvement projects. Over a nine month period, projects were successfully completed in Dietary, Nursing, Psychiatry, Materials Management, Pharmacy, Health Information, and Outpatient Surgery, they are now ready to begin the second round of projects.
One major source of dissatisfaction for physician and nursing staff has been slow turnaround time (TAT) for laboratory tests. The lab performs about 3000 blood tests per week, the most common being CBC (complete blood count), serum electrolytes (sodium, potassium, chloride and CO2), BUN, a kidney function test, and blood sugar.
Given the high level of complaints about slow lab test turnaround time, the Assistant Administrator asked the Quality Council to initiate a Performance Improvement project team to tackle the problem of improving the number of tests completed within the hospital standard. The Quality Council agreed, chartered a team, and asked the Assistant Administrator to act as Team Leader.
The Assistant Administrator was familiar with Total Quality Management concepts and recruited a team, including the Transport Supervisor, who had recently attended a class in PI Methods and Tools. When all the recruiting was done, the team members were:
Lotta Paper, Assistant Administrator – Team Leader
Tom Trotter, Transport Supervisor – Quality Advisor
Beth Harrast, Floor Secretary, 3A
Harry Hiteck, Day Supervisor, Lab
Sam Drawit, Day Phlebotomist
Steve Spinner, Evening Lab Tech
Cathy Filer, Health Information Management
Problems with scheduling the team meetings made in impossible to include a representative from the lab night shift.)
Part 2: The following information was extracted from the floor secretary logs from the past week.
A total of 3622 tests were done and 589 were over the standards for turnaround time
The breakdown by urgency is as follows:
Of 459 STATs, 77 were over standard
Of 1042 Urgents, 334 were over standard
Of 2121 Routines, 178 were over standard
You want to bring a graph of this data for the next team meeting.
TASK for PART 2:
Create a graph, using Excel, depicting the data above. Analyze this data once your graph is made. What conclusions can be drawn? Write a short summary of what the graph is telling you.
Decide! Does the team have enough data? Brainstorm a list of the data you would like to have. Where would you get that data? Submit a shortlist of your brainstorm ideas and explain what you would discuss with the team regarding gathering more