Keeping PACE In Today’s Environment

Keeping PACE with today’s ever evolving healthcare environment can be a real challenge for leaders and providers looking to hold the line and grow the future at the same time.

Minimizing the risk that errors from the past can come back to repeatedly haunt an organization, ensuring that the present environment is being managed as efficiently and effectively as is possible, delivering the best outcomes and continuously growing the future in order to keep pace with all that new technology, evidence and knowledge has to offer can keep the average healthcare organization running to keep up. How well a provider does is largely dependent on the strength of its quality improvement process and ability to hardwire results.

Hardwiring and expediting quality improvement opportunities in order to keep PACE with the next opportunity to strengthen the line and advance what a provider can offer is a lot simpler in SQSS. Users can exercise greater flexibility and control in managing their opportunities for improvement inside a rapid cycle approach that is user-friendly and recognizes that time counts.

The quality improvement features in SQSS make it easy to add initiatives, keep them current, and monitor for critical progress. As strengthening a line that is always under siege is just as important as holding it once it is has been secured and finding ways to solidify the patient/provider relationship, the quality and performance improvement features in SQSS are designed to complement the quality assurance features in ways that support an aggressive and sustainable form of continuous quality improvement.

In support of keeping pace with such an environment, SQSS is designed to promote a type of rapid cycle quality improvement approach that can operate with a range of project management methodologies. These include PACEe, PDSA, PDCA, DMAIC and DMADV. Rather than pushing an organization into a methodology that may not be a good cultural fit, SQSS is designed to support the approach that is the best fit for the organization.

Regardless of the methodology used, the goal is to identify an opportunity to improve, establish the plan to get started (P), act on it to start improving (A), check it for progress (C), enhance the original plan to maximize the potential for a successful outcome (E) and find the efficiencies in the final version of the plan to optimize resources and promote sustainability (e). The goal is a process that keeps pace and never requires an organization to look back.

SQSS also supports the management of multidisciplinary initiatives where one improvement in organizational performance can require contributions from multiple sources or groups.

Multidisciplinary initiatives are commonplace in hypercomplex environments like health care. One goal such as improving patient satisfaction in the emergency room related to timely discharges or reducing the number of late charges that slow up billing can require contributions from multiple groups in order to achieve success. Making the patient experience better is not as easy as telling the nurses to get the patients out of the emergency room faster when physicians and multiple diagnostic departments can impact how long a patient waits. The performance improvement feature in SQSS is designed to take an activity that can easily resemble herding cats and drive a level of coordination and accountability into every contribution to make success possible. Similar to other features, the system makes it easy for leaders to have their fingers on the pulse of such initiatives with a couple of simple clicks.

We built our system on four principles, based on 30 years in safety-critical environments.

Holding The Line
For Quality