In 2014 Jess Jacobs, a director in an innovation lab, started blogging about her experience as she received treatment for two rare diseases. Jess was trained as a Six Sigma Green Belt. So unlike your average patient, she described one 12-hour wait in the ER as having a “7% process cycle efficiency.” Likewise, she determined that just 29% of her 56 outpatient doctor visits were useful. She made 20 visits to the emergency room and spent 54 days in the hospital across nine admissions, but her calculations showed that just 0.08% of that time was spent treating her conditions. “Stop wasting my time,” Jess wrote in one blog entry. “Stop wasting my life.”
Health Care Providers Must Stop Wasting Patients’ Time
An example from Kaiser Permanente shows how to do it.
May 24, 2017
Summary.
While health care providers strive to improve quality of care, many patients feel that they ignore a critical metric: the patient’s time. As a result, patients often end up spending more time waiting than actually receiving care. Kaiser Permanente is working to improve on this metric. To that end, the provider has had to upend traditional paradigms and make saving patients time a part of its standard quality measures. In the case of hip and knee replacement surgery, for instance, Kaiser Permanente has redesigned the entire cycle of care, reducing what used to be a 3-day hospital stay to same-day discharge, with no impact on readmission rates.