Dr. Skip's Medical Peer Review Blog: Accountability + Transparency = Improved Quality + Patient Safety

Friday, February 22, 2008

Accountability + Transparency = Improved Quality + Patient Safety

Building & Leading a Continuous Improvement Culture

As I roam the internet looking for new knowledge and ideas on how to improve External Peer Review,I'm amazed at the plethora of statistics, data, measures and analysis that's being done in the name of improving hospital quality and patient safety. My hat goes off to those who use analytical tools as the foundation for performance improvement in hosptials. 

Having said that, in my humble opinion, we could make much great strides in much shorter time if management and medical staff focused more of its effort on building accountability and transparency into their hospital cultures, as opposed to spending more time and money crunching numbers.

An increased emphasis on setting clearer practitioner expectations, measuring and monitoring their performance, sharing performance data and holding poor performers accountable is what's in order. We see/hear of too many situations in hospitals across the country where conflict of interest, conflict avoidance, cover-ups and other behavioral dysfunction allow under-performing physicians to keep doing what they are doing.

What I'm advocating is medical staff leadership that goes beyond analysis and statistics, but rather uses this data to place increased emphasis on creating a culture of continuous improvement. In such a culture, sentinel event data is openly shared, performance is actively measured, practitioner work is subjected to regular/period external peer review, and poor performers are put on a corrective action program, no matter who/how important they are.