Engineers explore improvement toolkit, root cause analysis solution

By Patty Enrado, Editor

Thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s health IT incentives and short legislative timelines, providers are rushing to implement electronic health records. As many providers are finding out, however, adoption is the hardest part of the implementation.

Changing workflow is a critical component to optimizing the technology and thus to the success of EHR implementation, according to Pauline Hogan, performance improvement engineer at Franciscan Skemp Healthcare.

Hogan and Mark Galley, certified reliability engineer at ThinkReliability, will discuss workflow optimization and the Management Engineering-Process Improvement toolkit in their education session 47, “The ME-PI Tool Set,” Monday, March 1, at 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM in Room B304.

Hogan hopes attendees realize the benefit of sound management engineering techniques to improve efficiency. “It’s all about process,” she said. “You need to find expedient ways to optimize efficiency of the workflow, instead of automating bad processes.”

Hogan will showcase work done by the HIMSS Management Engineering-Process Improvement Community the last year and a half. A volunteer subset of the community developed the ME-PI toolkit, a suite of 200 downloadable tools designed to improve the efficiency and workflow in all areas of an organization. Hogan will walk through how to locate and use the toolkit, which launched in December 2009.

Galley will conduct a deep dive in cause mapping, showing attendees how to download and use the tool via a thorough documentation of a process or problem using Microsoft Excel. “By focusing on fundamental principles, people see how all the problem-solving tools are aligned, not how they’re different,” he said.

Hogan stressed the collaborative effort by members for members to grow the toolkit content and use it. “The ongoing success of the toolkit is dependent on members submitting tools or content that they’ve developed,” she said.

No tags