3 Tips for Leveraging Internal Improvement Successes for Continued Learning

Healthcare improvement leaders used to rely on dated survey results and expensive third-party consultants for improvement strategy, best practices, and insights—usually to confirm hunches they already had, but couldn’t prove. While surveys are still useful and necessary, consultants can take up a large chunk of an already thin-stretched improvement budget.

Leaders can put the days of dated data and costly consulting behind them now that a healthcare improvement operating system can provide real-time progress data and comprehensive reporting complete with improvement metrics and insights. The systems also recommend an appropriate internal leadership and frontline engagement model.

But once you have all that quality data and have identified which efforts were successful, what can you do with that knowledge? The real advantage of advanced improvement insights is how you use them to cultivate systematic success across your organization.

3 Steps to Create Best Practices from Internal Improvement Data

1. Identify Improvement Exemplars

These are gold-standard examples of what improvement success looks like in your organization. With a central platform to organize teams, assign tasks, and tie initiatives to outcomes, you can look back to see what combinations of senior leadership, local sponsorship, and frontline actions worked to accelerate healthcare improvement.

What was the team structure? Who were the leaders?

How many other goals were worked on concurrently? Was this unit-specific, departmental, or system-wide improvement?

Who were the key players? How was the goal established? How was progress measured?

Analyze the success from every angle to learn what worked and what didn’t.

2. Create a List of Best Practices

Now that you’ve analyzed the components of the improvement plan that were successful, create a list of best practices to share with other improvement teams and local leaders.

This can be a checklist or a template that others can easily follow and adapt for their department or unit.

Don’t wait until you have several successes to assemble and distribute the best practices list. Best practices based on just one improvement success can give critical details and confidence to other improvement teams.

Most importantly, keep the list updated based on subsequent learnings and successes, and create multiple best practices lists specific to certain departments or types of improvements desired.

3. Spread the Word

If your team is excited about your success, others will be too! They will also be eager to hear just how you did it. If you’ve been able to achieve significant results in quality, safety, or experience improvement, think about how you can effectively raise awareness of your achievement around your organization.

Consider appointing an internal improvement champion who can act as an ambassador to senior leaders, local leaders, and improvement teams system-wide. Assemble a brief presentation with high-level talking points about how your team achieved significant improvement results and how you saved the organization time and money. Offer to have follow-up meetings or act as an internal consultant to set others up for success.

This knowledge transfer can turn small pockets of improvement success into accelerated improvement across your organization.

For Best Practices, Look Inside Your Organization First

With the proper tools, intelligent healthcare leaders can leverage internal improvement data, intuition, and intimate understanding of their organization to identify barriers to success, recognize improvement exemplars, and spread knowledge across the company.

Trust your data—you know what’s best for your organization.

Ready to more efficiently allocate improvement budgets and get the data your team has been craving? Schedule an ACT demo to see how easy it is to get started.