Question

How can Six Sigma or other frameworks be used in healthcare risk management?

Answer 1

Six Sigma is a set of a tool aimed to improve the way the quality and measurement systems worked so as to eliminate errors. This tool helps to improve quality by finding defects, determining their cause, and improving processes to increase the repeatability and accuracy of process results.

In healthcare poor quality of care could be a determining factor between life and death. Defects could occur, long waiting times, the wrong diagnosis, wrong prescriptions, and treatments. Hence, employing Six Sigma in healthcare will help improve quality patient care, reduce waste, and eliminate these defects.

Though six stigmas is very difficult to practice and execute especially in health care the advantages of it far outweigh the disadvantages. It provides healthcare management an idea on how to manage procedures including registering patients, filing claims, surgeries, and transplants that require different processes. Due to medical errors and wrong prescriptions and treatment, there is a decrease in efficiency and safety in healthcare. However, implementing Six Sigma in health care will help reduce all of these to the barest minimum. Six Sigma helps hospitals to deliver health care services effectively and efficiently. This leads to less morbidity and mortality. It also ensures safer patient care, quick service delivery and more coordinated care. Practicing the six stigmas enhances the levels of patient satisfaction, reduces patient waiting time and promotes quick health delivery.

The methodology that is used:

D - Define: Identity of patients, as well as their needs and wants, will be clearly defined.

M - Measure: The performance of healthcare, based on the improvements, need to be measured. Changes or improvements can be measured by the level of patient satisfaction, service cost, the rate of clinical excellence and so on

A - Analyse: Six Sigma tools should be used to analyze data collected for measurement to ensure efficiency. The analysis stage may involve complex statistical techniques to zero in on the actual cause of a quality issue.

I - Improve: During the Improve stage, the entire approach to patient care may need to undergo several changes and modifications. To track progress, effective monitoring of the performance of these improvements is an essential component of this stage.

C - Control: It may involve the introduction of new policies, protocols, etc, to ensure that care is provided at the high that has been achieved throughout the DMAIC processes

There are lots of challenges faced by healthcare in terms of delivering outstanding patient care. These include Competition, increasing health care costs, lack of access to information, high patient and bystanders expectations, and advancing technology. The implementation of six sigma is used.

Failure mode and effect analysis is a tool used in improving quality. This helps to prevent defects that could be injurious to patients, families and employees. It can be used to continuously check and detect likely errors in a process. By so doing, management can redesign the process into a new model that is free from errors. When FMEA is properly executed in the health care system, patient safety and satisfaction increase.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a Six Sigma tool used to design a product or service from scratch. The most popular design for this method is DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, Verify). Like all Six Sigma projects, this approach also requires that the customer requirements are well defined. The needs of the customers and the competitors should be measured and determined. The process options should be analyzed and designed in detail to meet the customer’s needs. Finally, the performance of the design and its ability to meet the needs of customers must be verified.

Although Six Sigma is quite new to the healthcare sector, it can be used in a number of medical fields to achieve optimal results. For example, Six Sigma can be used to optimize resources used to operate machines, like MRI, and the scheduling of time for testing equipment. Likewise, Six Sigma can be used to discharge patients faster and to plan a higher priority service for patients. Six Sigma in healthcare can be used to improve nursing, treatments, hospital support, laboratory, technical and managerial services