William Choctaw, MD, the physician advisor for The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, outlined four ways to create sustainable healthcare projects and processes.
Here are the insights Dr. Choctaw shared:
1. Define problems. Assessing how a problem can be solved by consulting an overall team, infrastructure and timeframe can help get to the bottom of the problems affecting a health system.
2. Work with quality data. Consulting quality data as a source to assess how severe the problem is can be useful in the decision-making process.
3. Check improvement. Once a project is completed, progress and improvement needs to be monitored.
4. Account for failure. Having plans in place to address failure is key to increasing project sustainability. Asking a team how improvement can fail is one way to plan for failures.