A Healthcare Role Model

I don’t know if the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, has thought about applying for the Baldrige Award, but it should. It’s already a role model for high-performing healthcare organizations.

A recent article in BusinessWeek lists its world-class attributes (“Hospitals: Radical Cost Surgery,” Catherine Arnst, January 7, 2010):

• Uses scorecards throughout the hospital to measure quality and efficiency
• Acts on innovative ideas from staff (a nursing team’s idea to check on patients every two hours to see if they need help moving around their rooms reduced falls by 25%)
• Places the day-to-day care of most inpatients in the hands of hospitalists (the program reduced length of stay, infections, and surgical complications)
• Created “single stay” wards where, after heart surgery, cardiac patients remain in one room throughout their recovery (patient satisfaction soared and average length of stay dropped by more than a day)
• Breaks even on Medicare patients while almost 60% of U.S. hospitals lose 20 cents on the dollar
• Offers financial training to 800 independent doctors affiliated with Providence to get them thinking about cost efficiencies
• Established an independent panel to investigate medical mistakes, share its finding with patients, and voluntarily offer a financial reward if warranted (Providence has two malpractice suits pending compared to 12 to 14…

Ground Zero for Customer Service

The Baldrige Criteria have several questions that, when asked, can trigger the “deer in the headlights” stare. In my experience, this question almost always gets that response:

“How do you ensure that customer support requirements are deployed to all people and processes involved in customer support?”

The questions that precede it ask how you determine the key mechanisms to support your customers, what those mechanisms are, how they vary with different customer and market groups, and how you determine your customers’ key support requirements. By the time people get to the last question of the bunch, they are frequently so exhausted from scrambling to answer the first four questions that this one pushes them over the edge. Most can come up with their key customer support mechanisms, although the processes for determining what they are can be dodgy. They can usually describe the variations in mechanisms, but few have good answers for how they determine their customers’ support requirements.

Answering the last question well requires sound, systematic approaches to the first four, which is why it can be frustrating

One organization that has world-class responses to these questions is The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. A two-time Baldrige Award recipient, Ritz-Carlton excels because of its legendary…