"Standardizing Healthcare for Improved Patient Experience"

To be able to manage the changes, challenges and complexities that healthcare reform will bring along, it is essential that healthcare organizations shape up beforehand.

Healthcare CEOs should ask themselves what the core processes that touch patients’ lives are, and how they can be enhanced and standardized to made sure that they happen for every patient every time, recommends Bill Leaver, President and CEO of the Iowa Health System.

The uncertainties around the healthcare reform and not knowing exactly what will be required or implemented as part of the legislation is a challenge. The current delivery system and payment mechanism are not sustainable; therefore we are concerned whether the reform will go far enough in incentivizing hospitals and physicians to change the way they care for patients and the way in which they are paid for their services.

Physicians are also facing the same uncertainties and are unhappy with the Medicare payment methodology that Congress passed some time ago, whereby every month they need to take action to prevent an automatic 21 per cent decrease of their payments.

Over the last two years, we have been preparing for a very different patient care delivery model, focusing more on treating the patient population as a whole, creating better and more frequent contact with patients, particularly chronic care patients, as they are the biggest single driver of cost.

We are working on creating a common vision on how we treat the chronic patient population across our organization and aligning everyone to that goal. We tried to assess which key elements and processes were necessary for a good patient outcome and experience every time, and came to an understanding that standardizing what we do could maximize the quality of healthcare delivery and improve patient safety.

It is important for healthcare CEOs to create consistency and constancy of purpose, and focus the organization around the elements that are critical to success. They should think of the core processes that touch all patients that are perhaps done hundreds of times a day that can be improved. And they need mechanisms and management in place to ensure that they happen every time. What makes healthcare so complex is that we are relying on hundreds or thousands of people to carry on those steps every time. Thus, a very clear standardized process is needed.

We are also focused on making sure our clinical IT platform supports our core processes, and where necessary, matching and leveraging technology to support those core processes.

Bill Leaver, President & Chief Executive Officer, Iowa Health System, spoke at the National Healthcare CXO Summit Spring 2010, 25-27 April, in Hollywood, USA.