The Five Rights of Effective Clinical Process Redesign

Right Consensus

The Right Consensus exists when the Board, Executives, Medical Staff, and Hospital Staff all share the same vision and have in some way contributed to shaping or validating it. The benefits of such a consensus are enormous and are based on the idea that extensive, valid, participation results in selection of goals that are well suited to the organization. 

The Right Consensus prevents the organization from getting distracted by influential but parochial interests. This focus enables more rapid and appropriate transformation. 

Achieving consensus requires leadership and engagement of the executive team to make it clear to all that consensus building warrants their attention. Once created, full public endorsement and cheerleading by those executives solidifies the entire organization's re-orientation.

Consensus is not created by directive. Instead, it requires participation by many, with enough process to make it clear that ideas are not being imposed but are instead being created or endorsed. 

Patient care systems are complex. There are myriads of opportunities to streamline and improve care. In fact, most staff can easily list the tasks they do manually that could benefit from the application of the right technology. Unfortunately, no organization has the capacity to deploy technology to improve every task and even if it did, it couldn't do all of them first. Thus, the organization has to decide what it is going to do and what will be done first.

Education is the first need, an opportunity for caregivers and supervisors in different roles and patient care areas to learn from one another about their tasks and their frustrations-- and the ways in which patients and their caregivers can be aided by technology.

Prioritization is an essential component of such efforts. Select several criteria against which different functionalities may be judged and use a forced ranking methodology--hard choices have to be made! Following this procedure will isolate about 1/3 of the options that are clearly ranked more highly than the others--validating the 80/20 Principle that a small sub-set of inputs produce the vast majority of outputs. 

To build the consensus, these priorities should be broadly discussed by other audiences, which usually serves to validate their utility to the organization and its patients and staff.

Five Rights Consulting has assisted numerous organizations, from gigantic to small, in forming such a powerful consensus and consequently has both expertise and methodologies that help an organization expeditiously achieve this important component of transformation.

A great vision helps, but the Right Sequence makes it appear doable.