As you schedule your quality improvement (QI), evidence-based practice (EBP), and research projects in 2022, your department, hospital, or health system likely has a good idea of where improvements should be explored and implemented. Your QI director has a tiered list with the top projects that most closely align with your organizational goals or result in the most significant ROI. That list is fluid, with projects added throughout the year and some never getting off the ground.
Your primary objective is to generate impactful results from these projects. Many factors contribute to each project’s success: the team members and their enthusiasm for the project, the quality of the research they do, their ability to collaborate, how they evaluate and disseminate their findings. But the glue that can hold a project together, the foundation from which everything evolves, is the workflow. It’s time to look at your QI, EBP, and research project workflows, to determine if they’re making your projects efficient and effective or impeding desired results.
A different process flow for every QI project
QI methodologies such as Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC), Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA), and DMADV (Define-Measure-Analyze-Design Verify) outline project steps at a high level. The same can be said for EBP methodologies with Johns Hopkins, University of Iowa, and Joanna Briggs Institute models. In addition, many hospitals and health systems have developed templates to guide teams through a standardized process, while some have no consistent model at all.
Even with these methodologies, every process flow will be different, depending on the organization. For example, for some hospitals, Microsoft Word and Excel are essential tools for quality improvement projects. The most sophisticated institutions will have hundreds, if not thousands, of process maps to visually describe the information flow. But how much waste — in time, steps, resources, and touchpoints — are they actually eliminating?
Plus, if there’s a poor workflow or none at all, there’s a greater chance that a weak or incorrect intervention is identified and implemented, which is demoralizing for the team and ineffective for the institution.
