Team meetings spur quick results

Team meetings spur quick results

Generating projected revenue increases of $20 million to $24 million is impressive enough, but accomplishing the task in less than a year is really remarkable. How did The Medical Center of Central Georgia in Macon do it? By laying a solid foundation with the help of Elm Grove, WI-based Compirion Healthcare Solutions.

"Starting in June 2008, we sat down with them and our nursing group, our medical director, and our administration, and at the very beginning we developed what metrics we wanted to improve and determined our baselines," recalls Barb Stickel, MSN, RN, senior vice president and chief nursing officer. "We wanted to increase volume, improve quality of care within our core measures, and look at patient satisfaction — because any time you make changes, you do not want to adversely impact patient satisfaction."

The implementation phase was completed in December 2008, and it clearly has succeeded. In addition to boosting revenue and reducing the percentage of patients who leave before treatment, Stickel reports that core measures "are just about running at 100%." These include giving aspirin and beta-blockers to heart attack patients within 90 minutes, and blood cultures and antibiotics for pneumonia patients within four hours.

As wait times dropped, patient satisfaction scores climbed from the ninth percentile to higher than a 90th percentile ranking. "Our task force selected five questions for every patient to be asked," says Stickel, noting they included topics such as wait time, overall experience, and confidence and trust in their doctor.

The staff are able to keep track of their performance thanks to a dashboard developed with Compirion. "We have a weekly dashboard of our metrics, which shows us what the baselines were and what our targets are," Stickel explains. "We still look at them. We don't want to get complacent."