DailyKaizen

This week, we’re doing a rapid process improvement that is near and dear to us, clinical quality.

There are lots of way to talk about quality in health care. One way is by looking at HEDIS, which is what we are doing this week. The exciting thing about this week is that we are leveraging all the work we have done to build our world-class electronic medical record / clinical information system to improve quality. For an informaticist in our organization, it’s the equivalent of taking the jet into flight, because informatics doesn’t exist to implement technology. It exists to support members’ health.

Wikipedia defines Informatics as “the structure, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process and communicate information.”

We don’t define informatics or health informatics that way. We define it as “information storage and processing that improves the care experience, clinical excellence, and affordability of health care (for our members).” Health care exists to support people in achieving their life goals.

It reminds me of the story in The Toyota Way where the IT manager of a factory presents the IT plan to the factory manager, and the response is, “I don’t see any cars on this diagram. Show me how technology supports the building of cars.”

I can see from this week that it’s not the LEAN tools that provide benefit (even though they really help move the work faster), it’s the way we think that does. As we go over quality measures and think about how we exercise the power of the tools we have, we are thinking about how each impacts the member’s experience. If we stray and focus on the technology or the staff supporting it, we can get right back to the member by asking, “where are the cars (our members) on this diagram?”

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