- NURS FPX 8010 Assessment 4 Executive Summary
Executive Summary
The main priority of Kaiser Permanente’s radiology department is to reduce image processing time which is crucial in delivering quick and high-quality care. This proposal presents a quality improvement plan to resolve this problem briefly. It applies a Six Sigma DMAIC approach to identify and rationalize the causes of delays. The main objective is to streamline processes to the extent that the time elapsed between taking a photograph and receiving a message that is authenticated is minimal across all modes.
It depends on evidence of the adverse impact of prolonged waiting times on the management of care and treatment, choices, safety, and outcomes. This project meets all the quality, safety, service, and economic goals of the entire company. SWOT analysis revealed strengths of supportive leadership and data availability, and weaknesses such as IT issues and deeply ingrained cultural practices.
Key process measures will monitor the total return time and other components such as requests to verify wait times. Downstream indicators will measure the satisfaction of providers and patients, length of stay and increase in throughput. Making the community work through participation teams and regular comments will be crucial for getting ideas that modify solutions and secure approval. Kotter’s change model demonstrates what leaders need to do in each stage to create change and continue it.
By modifying the policy to make doctor breaks more flexible and providing incentives for quick return times, structural barriers and liability will be corrected. An alignment between people, methods, and technology is necessary for the success of the project. However, this is a very effective way for the imaging department to achieve its strategic objectives as it will help to enhance patient care by speeding up the process of diagnosis and making the predictions more accurate.
Quality Improvement Proposal
A quality improvement program is one of the crucial components of converting strategic objectives into outcomes. Formal initiatives of quality improvement make plans come into action with the help of specific projects, and solutions, so they stay as an idea in books. For instance, a Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) project could assist the radiology department in achieving its objective of reducing the turnaround time of images.
This is because it makes it possible to locate and eliminate the reasons for delays. A project like this would leave us with an organization, systems, and knowledge that could be used to make steady progress toward a critical goal metric. The concept of quality improvement makes the business case, implementation plan, and review framework in which quality principles are actively applied to strategic objectives. This bridges the void of the plan-making process and implementation (Barkoudah, 2022).
The Rationale for Establishing a Strategic Priority
On-time sending out of the MRI data must ensure high-quality care and the best possible outcomes for the patient. Nevertheless, research has shown that imaging findings are delayed in various sample and method settings (Zabel et al., 2020). Delays contribute to diagnostic difficulties, treatment decision-making, prolonged hospital stays, and even increased risk of death (Nilbert, 2021). The wait time in the imaging department of Kaiser Permanente is a very important stage of the care cycle as a central integrated delivery system; therefore, the wait time in this department must be as short as possible.
NURS FPX 8010 Assessment 4 Executive Summary
This quality improvement plan is aimed at reducing the time to get the pictures back to the lab by using a focused project to identify and fix what causes delays. This is directly in line with the department’s general aspiration to reduce response times. The enhancement of this operating process and testing result reporting accuracy will assist in achieving the overall goals of service, patient safety, and quality of care. The project can demonstrate how analytics, process changes, and new technology can help to make diagnostic tasks more effective (Chowdhry et al., 2021).
Implications and Consequences
The goal of Kaiser Permanente is to cut the time of scan processing directly affects the speed and quality of patient care throughout the whole organization. Delays in receiving imaging results can influence the next treatment options, jeopardize you by not having enough information, and decrease satisfaction for both you and your provider. Process bottlenecks can be overcome with the result that diagnosis is made faster, and care is coordinated more effectively, which produces better outcomes. This demonstrates a significant comprehension of what it means to enhance critical testing processes (Rajesh Bhayana et al., 2020).
SWOT Analysis
The following are some of the most important findings from a SWOT study of Kaiser Permanente’s efforts to shorten the time it takes to process image requests: The following are some of the most important findings from a SWOT study of Kaiser Permanente’s efforts to shorten the time it takes to process image requests:
Strengths
The personnel in the radiography department are very proficient and well-experienced. Voice recognition reports and PACs are already being used which strengthens the base. The management is looking to enhance operations and is ready to invest in such projects. Targeted solutions can be developed on robust data for existing cycle times (Parikh et al., 2021).
Weaknesses
Tech-radiologist shift mismatches and processes contained in silos are among the elements the source of delays. Bottlenecks occur due to the lack of workers during peak periods. IT tools of different kinds should function together. Problems that have existed before, make staff more reluctant to accept major changes (Krop et al., 2021).
Opportunities
Some new voice recognition technologies and workflow improvements could be employed. Modifying the way how compensation works to favor pace could offer monetary advantages. External competition from other imaging groups would drive internal changes. It is important for the whole system that the quality and safety are valid and this project is in line with that goal (Kapoor et al., 2020).
Threats
In case people consider the price of new instruments to be high, they will not be in favor of them. Radiologists who like the status quo are protesting. Unions can oppose modifications in the way work is performed. According to Brown et al. (2023), there is no model of effective change management in this environment.
This research offers insight into the company’s strengths and opportunities, as well as the external factors that impact the firm in a manner that is both thoughtful and politically correct. To strategically navigate change (Brown et al., 2023), you need to have a full picture of the situation by taking into account all strengths and weaknesses of your company, its culture, and its larger strategic goals as well as the perspectives of the stakeholders.
Key Performance Indicators
One of the key process measures is the average time to get from image capture to report review in the Radiology Information System. Segmenting people into categories of imaging studies e. g. CT, MRI, Ultrasound and important service lines like ED, Inpatient, and Outpatient will provide detailed information that can be utilized for finding the problematic areas and leaving opportunities open.
Other indicators would include the number of minutes from the last test end to the start of the next step and the last step end to re-confirm that the steps are in a clean state. The lack of some radiology capacity can also be demonstrated by the additional hours that the radiologists are required to report.
Satisfaction metrics in radiology contact and care planning will tell if quicker response times are viewed as benefits. Indicators such as ED length of stay and door-to-discharge times can demonstrate where systems have been improved. If one of the goals is to cut costs, one should watch clear indicators such as the amount of extra paid to radiologists, transcription costs, and staff absence caused by stress. This improvement can be displayed in many ways using process, result, and financial measures of how performance has increased in line with the strategy goal of reducing turnaround time (de Kok et al., 2020).
Stakeholders Identification and Feedback
The involvement of the key players early on and throughout the project is critical to effecting change. Radiologists and techs face-to-face with the patients will offer lots of valuable information on the troubles and possible ways of facilitating the process. To have clarity about ownership, they have to be an active part of process designing.
NURS FPX 8010 Assessment 4 Executive Summary
Referring doctors are the stakeholders who either support the advantages of the initiative or halt it if they do not approve. Patients can tell a story so that changes be made to fill in gaps in customer service. The administration of the hospital will determine the resource utilization and how they would be linked with other initiatives towards making improvements. For funding to proceed, they should inform us about wins, barriers, and needs (Halvorson & Englander, 2020).
Representative project teams, polls, focus groups, and contact will foster our collaborative effort. Stakeholders in the planning process can provide an answer that satisfies a lot of different needs. Once adoption takes place, both quantitative and qualitative feedback loops will be used to improve and manage partner relationships. The enhancement project is more likely to generate durable, useful results when partners are included from the beginning and their divergent views are incorporated in small ways (Ali &Haapasalo, 2023).
Role of Change Theory
Kotter’s famous change model gives an organized way to lead big projects through eight important steps: forcing, forming, framing, selling, stimulating, creating wins, harvesting gains, and anchoring change. The contemporary approach behind this has facilitated many organizations to survive challenging changes (McLaren et al., 2022).
To support this action initiative aimed at improving quality, Kotter’s plan would start by creating a sense of urgency with the help of the demonstration of what happens when the response time is too long. In such a case imaging, IT, and medicine leaders could initiate the goal and let everyone in the company know about the advantages.
Letting working stakeholders think and reinvent streamlined processes will help you to get quick wins and stale momentum. The leadership can continue to drive the change through the use of policies, tools, training, and the celebration of milestones accomplished. The Kotter method will provide you with the entire roadmap necessary to achieve lasting change whilst minimizing response time (PonceVega & Williams, 2021).
Policy Recommendation
The hospital policy of the doctors having to have lunch breaks even if the situation is busy should be changed to make the recommended process facilitation easier to achieve. This approach is inappropriate since the number of doctor coverages does not comply with the number of image requests, thus leading to delays. I believe that newly established coverage standards related to growth trends should be piloted first. This will allow doctors to have greater flexibility to take some rest while it is not so busy. It enables them to have the capability required when it is most needed and facilitates hand-offs easier (Büttner et al., 2021).
NURS FPX 8010 Assessment 4 Executive Summary
I believe that a new policy should also be formulated, which will set out return time targets for all imaging modalities and award doctors based on meeting these targets. Because before there wasn’t a lot of performance management on turnaround measures, this approach would make people accountable. Rewards help in making the organization’s goals more apparent and stimulate them to use correct processes. In this context, the existing policies are not consistent with the targets of improvement. Nevertheless, policies that are new and fresh can demand accountability from people and empower them to make changes (England et al., 2021).
Conclusion
Kaiser Permanente’s radiology department has placed a reduction in scan process times as one of their top strategic objectives. The purpose is realized by the quality-improving project proposed, which applies a data-driven DMAIC approach towards simplifying the processes and eliminating the bottlenecks. To be effective, one should engage many different people, use change management models, establish enabling rules, and monitor the correct performance indicators.
By turning this strategy goal into an improvement project that can be realized, the department will achieve substantial progress in the area of service, quality, and safety goals to improve patient care. The project should be carefully planned and strongly guided, but it has a high potential for the most vital medical functions of the health system’s improvement. Read more about our sample NURS FPX 8010 Assessment 3 for complete information about this class.
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