Health Care and Six Sigma

Health Care and Six Sigma

Charleston Area Medical Center              

Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) is a hospital that is under state regulations as to what it can charge for patient care and is unable to raise prices to cover extensive costs.  This limits the amount of funds that hospital can use to pay for improvements and increasing wage costs so the hospital had to use alternative means to raise funds and they were able to do this with the help of Six Sigma and Total Quality improvements.  CAMC is now able to treat acute myocardial infarctions (AMI) 45 percent better than they used and has become one of the leading hospitals (Thompson, 2018).

               

Quality

Quality control is the key to success in implementing new strategies.  The success of this hospital was the actions that were taken to change the process that had been taken place.  For instance, the training of employees in the importance of change is extremely important.  For CAMC, the nursing staff was retrained with new performance and quality indicators for treating AMI’s and the results of this increased HOA compliance and quality standards from 50 percent to 95 percent of all patients (Thompson, 2018). 

Six Sigma Benefits         

The use of Six Sigma techniques of improving current processes and creating new processes has saved the hospitals millions in waste management.  Three tangible benefits that CAMC received from the use of Six Sigma was $150,000 in wasted inventory, $12 million in supply chain savings, and recognition for being a top leading hospital.  For instance, just improving the current process by eliminating wasted space and getting rid of outdated inventory by selling or scrapping gave them an instant win of $150,000 for the year.  Other improvements to the process and new processes for the supply chain has given them over $12 million extra over the past 4 years that can be used to improve other areas of the hospital (Thompson, 2018).

Six Sigma and Medication

Six Sigma has also been used in other areas of healthcare by creating more processes to ensure Total Quality management.  This approach uses metrics and other targets to give themselves benchmarks to show them whether the new processes are putting them on the track to achieve TQM.  There is an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year due to medical errors in the United States.  Medication errors account for about 7,000 of these deaths per year.  TQM is being implemented to reduce these errors (Revere & Black, 2003). 

                Six Sigma is responsible for implementing aggressive methods with better defined plans to work with TQM strategies.  In healthcare, Six Sigma has been responsible for implementing methods to streamline processes by finding variations in the process where defects could happen and getting rid of them.  When looking at the data for medication errors, it was broken down into 3 types of common error which were then analyzed into categories for how each of these errors could occur.  The conclusions of this data ultimately allowed them to find ways to streamline the process to eliminate the chances of these errors happening again (Revere & Black, 2003). 

Six Sigma and Streamlining

                Six Sigma is continuously used in the healthcare organization not only to improve the quality of patient care but to also increase profits for the facilities.  Improvements by Six Sigma also include reducing hospitalization expenses not only for the patient but for the out-of-pocket costs for the hospital as well.  The healthcare industry estimates about $3.6 billion in expenses that are not necessary.  With the use of the DMAIC approach to improvement, measurements of quality, speed, efficiency and patient satisfaction come under analysis.  Streamlining processes by improving technology has made several positive impacts in radiology, emergency care, and surgical departments.  It has decreased turnaround times, increased the quality of patient care, and reduced extra expenses that were unnecessary (Feng & Manuel, 2008).

References

Feng, Q. (., & Manuel, C. M. (2008). Under the knife: a national survey of six sigma programs in US healthcare organizations. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, 21(6), 535-547. Retrieved from https://www.freemanagementresources.com

Revere, L., & Black, K. (2003, Nov). Integrating Six Sigma with Total Quality Management: A Case Example for Measuring Medication Errors. Journal of Healthcare Management, 48(6), 377-391. Retrieved from https://www.freemanagementresources.com

Thompson, A. (2018). Crafting & Executing Strategy: The Quest for Competitive Advantage (21st ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. Retrieved from https://www.freemanagementresources.com