Quality, Safety, & High Reliability

Siloed clinical quality and patient safety processes, operations, and structures is a deep-rooted challenge many healthcare leaders have inherited. Lack of alignment and integration creates disconnection between the equity-informed care that organizations want to deliver consistently and the reality of their environments. It’s overwhelming, inefficient, and increasingly costly and ineffective.

We work with clients to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in alignment with nationally recognized HRO models, across both clinical and non-clinical operations. Our comprehensive assessment is conducted through the lens of four dimensions—structure, process, people, and resources—and results in a practical, achievable high reliability roadmap, a “true north” that informs organizational goals and priorities. Our solutions include strategies across operating model, governance and accountability, leading practice process implementation, leadership and training, data and analytics, and more.

Equity is embedded throughout our high reliability framework. Some organizations may have begun their high reliability journey but aspire to integrate equity more comprehensively. We partner to align and integrate equity into quality, safety, and operations as the primary goal. Our assessment and roadmap would include exploring overall structure, processes, people and resources to understand where equity work is embedded and where there are gaps. Specific solution examples include assessing how demographic information is collected and used at the patient level and in aggregate, looking at regulatory compliance, reviewing equity measures related to ratings and ranking systems, and optimizing data processes to ensure accuracy and improve performance.

While our definition of high reliability captures all that is part of an equitable, effective, safe, resilient system, patient safety is clearly a critical component to the equation. Our patient safety track centers on improving processes related to identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities that could lead to patient harm. Solutions may center on patient safety organizational structures and human resources, governance, committee structures, best practices around the peer review process, credentialing and privileging, ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE), focused professional practice evaluation (FPPE), and culture and safety.

We provide a deep assessment of how clinical outcomes are captured and transformed into administrative data. This includes functions of coding and clinical documentation improvement (CDI). We help organizations evolve from limited or traditional CDI for MS-DRG Medicare patients to a modern, coding for quality program that ensures administrative data is accurate for all patients. This helps organizations know their outcomes data are, in fact, accurate, and reflect true care delivered. 

Equally important to patient safety, our quality track helps clients understand and optimize performance. Specific solutions may include organizational structures and human resources, governance, committee structures, best practices around clinical care domains like mortality and readmissions, assessments of clinical variation, clinical pathways, models for measuring and optimizing performance on publicly-reported programs like value-based purchasing and ratings and rankings, and models to optimize voluntary databases and registries.