• Recognizing opportunities for improving the patient experience
• Creating an Office of Patient Experience
• Sustaining a culture of expected service behaviors
• Creating awareness around patient feedback & surveys and the impact employees have on the patient experience
• Discovering, implementing and promoting best practices to improve patient experience
• Planning for the future impact patient satisfaction will play in healthcare reform

Mary Linda Rivera, Executive Director, Office of Patient Experience, Cleveland Clinic

• Incorporating a patient-centred approach into corporate strategic goals
• Adapting to the changing healthcare landscape of increased performance visibility and competition
• Engaging the whole organization to improve the patient experience
• Using change management techniques to manage the transition

Doug Dulin, Senior Director, Center for Operations Excellence, Akron Childrenˇ¦s Hospital

The rules for healthcare reform continue to be unveiled. Hospitals are under pressure to perform. A sound management strategy and the application of Six Sigma methods are the pathway to excellence. Evidenced Based Practice and the Theoretical Limit (achieving perfection) is a journey that utilizes the fundamental equation of Six Sigma (Y= f(x) + ĺ) as the underlying basis to achieve process improvements. Management is thus enabled to insure staff safety, improved patient outcomes, and operational excellence that can be sustained over the long term.

Al Miller, Administrative Director, Performance Improvement Program Management, Blessing Hospital

• Bridging the gap between healthcare and retail to create services that meet patient needs
• Finding out what patients want by determining the Voice of the Customer
• How to use the Voice of the Customer for Lean Six Sigma projects in healthcare

Marcus Oksa, Director of Performance Improvement, Bay Area Medical Center

Patient-centered care has been Mayo Clinicˇ¦s focus for over 100 years and this session will share Mayo Clinic Arizona's model for improving service and creating value. Specific details will include how the model was piloted in five departments, how the model was rolled out to a wider audience, and the ensuing impact on patientsˇ¦ perception of excellence. In addition, this session will delve into the importance of using multiple data sources; providing service consultation, education, and training; setting service behavior standards; developing monitoring and control processes; recognition and reward strategies; and creating a culture of accountability. Several improvement tools will also be shared with attendees.

Denise Kennedy, Service Coordinator, Mayo Clinic

Columbus Regional Health recognizes the importance of process standardization as a foundation for process improvement. Understanding the patients needs and nurseˇ¦s frustrations, inpatient admission was chosen as a key process to standardize in 2011. This presentation will focus on our highlights, lessons, successes, and next steps in our process excellence journey with the inpatient admission process as an example.

Outcomes/Results:
• Systematic approach to performance driven leadership across the organization
• Adherence to process across all inpatient nursing units (consistency/stability)
• Increase Manager competence using metrics to hold staff accountable to process
• Increase ownership by all levels of leadership because of clear role definition in the standard process
• Patient & Nurse share focused attention during admission process

Doug Sabotin, Director Lean Sigma, Columbus Regional Hospital

• Using an electronic callback system
• Getting patient feedback and opportunity to intervene before the patient satisfaction survey
• Results achieved and tools used
Randall Cline, Master Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma, Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital

- Medical groups are increasingly going to be charged with achieving improved medical outcomes especially with regard to the major chronic diseases. Future compensation schemes for medical groups will increasingly be based upon the quality of outcomes and cost effectiveness of care.
- There are many theories about why chronic disease outcomes are so poor and many types of initiatives underway in different groups to improve outcomes.
- Engaging patients in wellness care and chronic disease management is one of the important tactics necessary to improve quality and cost effectiveness.
- This presentation will cite certain examples where patient engagement in combination with other quality methods helped to achieve nationally remarkable levels of chronic disease management success.

Robert Matthews, Executive Director, PriMed Physicians

Combing the role of a pivot nurse and Lean techniques within the ED can dramatically improve patient flow and increase patient satisfaction. As a result of this presentation, the participants will be able to:
• Identify the role o f the Pivot Nurse in the rapid assessment triage process
• Understand how the matching of staffing and workload impact flow
• Learn how sorting patient populations and bifurcating flows expedites patient care
• Develop metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of patient flow performance

Paula Antognoli, PhD., Lead Management Engineer, UHS of Delaware, Inc. a subsidiary of Universal Health Services

The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare’s third project focused on patient Hand-off Communications, which specifically looked at the transition of care of a patient from one setting to the next. The 10 health care organizations who participated with the Center originally worked on this project used the systematic approaches of Lean, Six Sigma, and Change Management to attack this important patient safety and quality problem.

The Center has since translated these learnings into many other health care settings using similar methodology, ultimately with a positive impact on patient safety and quality of care leading to an increase patient satisfaction. As an aggregate, organizations have experienced more than a 50 decrease in their defect rate, which is based off whether the hand-off met the needs of the care provider (sender or receiver). Depending on the transition measured, different outcome metrics affecting patient services have also been identified. Some examples include a 50 decrease in patient readmission rates (skilled nursing facility to hospital) and a 33% decrease in ER wait time.

Jerod M. Loeb, PhD., Executive Vice President, Division of Healthcare Quality Evaluation, Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare

Most front line individuals start motivated to provide high quality and safe care with great patient satisfaction but over time become deeply frustrated at constantly fighting the ˇ§hairballˇ¨ of the current condition. Front line individuals and teams speak of hitting brick walls when working each other or other departments. Endless workarounds and broken processes require senseless heroism by front line workers which wears down their spirit of caring. Some quality improvement efforts become an additional burden and sap even more energy.

How can individuals become rejuvenated in their work and teams providing better care? How can processes be redesigned in real time? How can quality and safety become fun again? Where do you start to try to detangle the hairball? Can you implement a healthcare worker friendly model to teach key but simple design principles so teams can constantly improve because they want to get better in their focus on the patient?

Learning Objectives
After this presentation you will be able to:
• Apply some new ideas to reenergize teams in process improvement
• Teach an interactive team exercise focused on improving processes in real-time
• Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of real-time, rapid cycle process improvement and contrast the traditional versus a new way of initiating process improvement

Diane Frndak, Vice President of Safety and Quality, West Penn Allegheny Health System

• Setting up systems and structures for increased collaboration and team work centered around patient and family
• Improving face-to-face interaction between physicians, nurses and patients
• Improving internal communication across the hospital to reduce errors, decrease LOS and improve patient and family satisfaction
• Performing a series of rapid improvement events to help physicians, nurses and staff eliminate waste in their daily tasks and allow patients more face-to-face interactions

Linda Severs, Black Belt and Master Change Facilitator, Providence Health & Services

Michelle James, Senior Director of Acute Care Services, Providence Health & Services

• Identifying the key elements of a patient experience program in your own hospital
• Putting the necessary resources in place
• Making patient experience a strategic goal

Marilyn Sherrill, Implementation Manager, Performance Services, VHA

• Decreasing waiting times and improving efficiency using Lean Six Sigma
• Reducing the time from patient referral to patient treatment
• Improving flow across departments

Alan Openshaw, MBB, Management Engineering, Manager, Intermountain Healthcare

• Using and customizing Lean & Six Sigma tools for patient-centered projects
• Reducing patient referral to appointment times and reducing process errors
• Reducing wait times and improving efficiency on personalized medicine, high volume and microbiology lab tests
• Reducing wait times on patient blood draws and reducing order errors

Ron Phipps, Project Director, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

• Leading a hospital based bed management project as a Black Belt/Consultant and how to work with customers to overcome the
• Receiving consulting services to improve patient satisfaction within an OB unit and how to support change efforts
• Different perspectives as a supplier and customer of Lean Six Sigma services

Louis Rhodes, Administrator, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, NYU Langone Medical Center

• Optimization planning
- surgical areas involved
- staffing roles examined
- methodology
• Optimization process
- what were the projects
- what was the data
- how the data was collected
• Optimization results
- outcome, process and balancing data
- key factors learned
- continuing opportunities

Thomas Jones, Improvement Coordinator, PeaceHealth

• Creating the Best Patient Financial Experience
• Using a clinical metrics for Revenue Cycle
• Streamlining Front End processes to increase patient satisfaction and increase registration accuracy
• Using Lean Concepts for Billing and Collections: What does the patient consider as Value Added steps?

Jennifer Van Dyke, Process Improvement Leader, Northwestern Memorial Hospital