7.9 End-of-Topic Case: Pursuing Further Healthcare Improvements

You have just received an internship offer to work at a children’s hospital over the summer, and one of your assignments is to help the hospital leadership team implement several initiatives to increase patient care quality while also reducing the average length of stay and children’s surgery costs. To start with, the leadership team is focusing on children’s open-heart surgery.

This is no easy task; in the U.S. alone, about 22,000 pediatric open-heart procedures are performed each year.

Open-heart surgery requires a patient to be placed on a heart-lung bypass machine. This equipment takes over the function of the heart and lungs to provide oxygenated blood to the body. During the procedure, the surgical team stops the heart with a solution that also protects the heart and muscles. They can then open and repair the bloodless and still heart. There are also situations when the team can operate while the heart is still beating.

After the surgery, the child will frequently go to the pediatric intensive care unit for close monitoring by specialist nurses and physicians. During this time, the child will have several tubes and wires attached to them. After a few days, the care team transfers the child to an inpatient ward.

While examining the current process used by the hospital, you decided to compare the hospital’s length-of-stay data to best-practice hospitals, noting further development opportunities.

You took a deep dive into the data before preparing your final report to present to the leadership team. The comparison indicated that the hospital discharged 40% of the patients on or after the eighth post-op day compared to 12% for benchmark hospitals. You also noted that, besides improving the quality of care, the hospital’s potential financial opportunity could be north of $300,000 annually.

After presenting your findings, the leadership team was so impressed that they offered you a permanent hospital position. Your new supervisors liked your observations so much, they requested that you implement an improvement project to tackle the issues you uncovered!

Before you get going, however, you need to do additional research and address some initial questions.

Questions

1. Using the information provided, develop a problem statement for your project.

2. Tentatively at this stage, who might you include in a stakeholder analysis and why?

3. What steps would you follow at this point and what would you produce?