This short animated video explains how to find and use our powerful how-to guides
Does your team want to improve service? Or clinical quality? If you don't know where to start, check out the teams-tested practices on the LMP website. This short video shows you how.
Having trouble using the search function? Check out this short video to help you search like a pro!
Need to find a checklist, template or puzzle? Don't know where to start? Check out this short video to find the tools you need on the LMP website with just a few clicks.
Format:
XLS (spreadsheet)
Size:
1 page
Intended audience:
UBT co-leads or team members
Best used:
Use this spreadsheet to track and determine the economic benefits of your team's performance improvement projects—you can easily see the impact of your efforts on the bottom line.
Note: Entries are placeholders; delete them and add your own information.
Leonard Hayes, manager of Environmental Services culture and training in the Northwest, oversees workplace safety for 125 outpatient EVS workers in five service areas. This includes the East Side service area, whose EVS unit he directly supervises and which has recorded no injuries for nearly five years. In February 2014, Hayes won the National Workplace Safety Individual Award. He spoke recently with Jennifer Gladwell, LMP communications consultant, about how he engages teams to work more safely.
A. You have to give people information and recognition. Workplace safety is a standing item on our UBT agendas. We talk about working safely, acknowledge how well our teams do and tell them “thank you.” I’ve been put in this job to take away the myths that injuries are inevitable, so people can go home at the end of their shift and enjoy their time outside of KP.
A. I’m in there with them physically. I’ve been a worker and I take interest in what the teams are doing. I try to make sure people know I care for them by being available to them and making sure they have the tools to do their job. I am committed to responding to issues as quickly as possible and resolving them. I have a great labor partner and co-lead, Sherri Pang. She’s been my anchor with the campus and the (East Side) team. She helps me a lot by sending emails, creating fliers, understanding and encouraging the team.
Format:
DOC
Size:
8.5” x 11” (1 sheet, 2-sided, four categories per side)
Intended audience:
Level 2 and higher unit-based teams
Best used:
Good introduction to performance improvement. Team members can use the sheets to capture notes under each waste category for further discussion and problem solving.
Use with:
Format:
PDF
Size:
8.5” x 11”
Intended audience:
Level 2 and higher unit-based teams
Best used:
UBT consultants and UPRs can use these instructions to guide teams on finding projects that solve for affordability. Allow 1½ to 2 hours for the full exercise.
Use with:
Format:
PDF (color and black and white)
Size:
8.5” x 11” (two-sided)
Intended audience:
Level 2 and higher unit-based teams
Best used: Download and share this introduction to performance improvement with team members as a guide to the common types of wasted resources that diminish care and service.
Use with:
The Imagining Care Anywhere exhibit, created by Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation and Advanced Technology team and the Garfield Innovation Center, illustrates how current and emerging technology makes it possible to bring health care directly to a patient’s home—or wherever a member may be—and can transform the way care is delivered at the doctor’s office and in the hospital. Dan Weberg is director of nursing innovation at the Garfield center and has been traveling to Kaiser Permanente facilities, conferences and union meetings to talk with people at all levels of the organization about the exhibit. He was interviewed by LMP Communications Director Andrea Buffa.
A. I have a really great job. I’m supposed to help envision the future about three to five years from now and figure out what technologies, what trends, what changes in nursing practices and what changes in health care might occur. And then help guide pilot projects and strategy and brainstorming sessions to move the organization toward that future.
A. Imagining Care Anywhere is the start of a conversation with everyone at Kaiser Permanente to create a vision of what it might look like in the future as we engage members no matter where they are. How can we seamlessly integrate their home life, their school life, their work life and their health interactions with Kaiser all together? How can we help people have a more healthy lifestyle or healthy work-life balance? It’s a tour that’s supposed to provoke people to think about and imagine what that care will look like.
A. One example is the smartphone. Many of us use it for everything from tracking our fitness goals to shopping lists to emails to Facebook. But the data and the information behind that can be integrated in with goals for your health life. We’re working on a project now called Profile and Preferences. You might be able to set personal health goals and then use the data you collect already—whether it’s through a fitness app or diet tracking—and upload that into your kp.org profile so you can see how you’re moving along with your goals. And then, when you meet with your care team, we have a better picture of who you are as a person, and we can help you facilitate your goals. Remote diagnostics and remote monitoring are a big deal now, too.
A. There are several organizations now that do tele-visits, including Kaiser. I think the future is going to hold more of these as our TVs and our cable providers get faster and faster internet and smarter devices. It may not be a full visit, but it may be a way to engage with a care provider—whether it’s a nurse, a physician, some sort of navigator or a health coach. Keeping people from having to drive into one of our facilities for simple things is going to be key.
A. In the exhibit, there’s a “journey home” board, which allows members to know exactly what has to happen before they get discharged. They don’t have to continue asking the nurse or the doctor or the care team by clicking the call light—they can see it right there and they’re able to access it.
The board is also about answering their questions conveniently and in a way they can understand. The exhibit has the idea of using an avatar. After a nurse or teacher comes in to do some kind of education, the member still has some questions. Instead of having to ask the same questions over and over and feeling a little uncomfortable, they’re able to use a virtual person to answer them.
A. I think as an institution we need to keep thinking about how we evolve our roles, what are the things we need to do differently. The technology is coming whether we want it or not, so it’s about continuing to imagine how specific roles might change and coming up with strategies to train our workforce to be able to evolve with the technology.
A. We’re really excited about the engagement with the unions. I think it’s great that they’re using Imagining Care Anywhere as a springboard to talk to their constituents about how the future of health care is going to evolve and also work to create that future with us.
The front line should be driving this because they know what’s broken. And they can help us address that early, before we get too far down the road with a solution that may not meet the real need.
A January UNAC/UHCP steward meeting in Southern California included a traveling version of the Imagining Care Anywhere exhibit, and nurses across Southern California weighed in with their thoughts about the emerging technologies.
Our dermatologist left and we didn’t have one for a while. We did “tele-derm” with a doctor in Orange County. We trained the medical office assistants on how to set up the technology. We could do the biopsies, if needed, at Kern. It evolved really nicely. It saves a visit for the patient. I don’t think all this technology will take jobs from nurses because we still need the human touch. Nurses will become more techno-savvy.
It’s great, but we have to slow down a bit. We don’t want to become an app. We still need that human connection.
I love change, but I’m a little concerned we might get out of touch with the patient. As long as we can listen to and touch and feel the patient, that’s OK.
I am concerned about the ability of computer systems to communicate with each other. We need to get the systems to connect in order to provide the best service.
It’s like having a Ferrari all of a sudden. You can drive really fast, but you need speed limits.
Marcella Austin spent her first six years at Kaiser Permanente as a medical assistant. Three years ago, she became a licensed vocational nurse through a partnership between KP, the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust, Chaffey College and the San Bernardino County Workforce Investment Board that funded a Pathway to LVN project. That gave her the support she needed to advance her career—tuition, books, tutoring and wages. She was one of the first of nearly 50 KP employees to graduate. She was interviewed by LMP Senior Communications Consultant Anjetta McQueen.
A. My father, who is diabetic, had a heart attack when I was in college. My mom and I were the first ones at the ER with him. It was scary, but I remember those nurses and how they took care of him and us. One of the nurses took an orange from her lunch and taught me how to do an insulin injection. I fell in love with nursing. Six months later, I became a medical assistant. I thought that was as close as I would get.
A. I went to school full time and worked in Urgent Care from 5 to 9, getting my 20 hours a week. The Ben Hudnall trust covered the other 20 hours. I never lost a paycheck. It’s not like I could say I didn’t have the funds—the funds were there.
A. I have two kids, a 16-year-old daughter and a son who is 13. I had a husband, mother and mother-in-law all helping me out. I used to be the one who cooked, cleaned and picked up after everyone. All of this helped my kids become more responsible.
A. I have taken one course or another since graduation from high school. I also took time to get married, have children. Chaffey pulled all of my transcripts from everywhere and offered the prerequisite classes I still needed.
A. We owe a lot of thanks to the county’s Workforce Investment Board. They saw a need for educating people in the community. We didn’t have to worry about transportation, uniforms or supplies during our clinicals. All of that can really add up.
A. Managers and labor leads stayed with us every step of the way. They had meetings with us. They kept asking us how they could help. If there was a barrier, if a schedule needed changing, they would work together to see that it got done. I especially appreciate the help from Susan Rainey, the department administrator for staffing at Ontario; career counselor Michele DeRosa with the Hudnall trust; Margaret Winningham, a senior Human Resources consultant for Fontana/Ontario; and Valerie Robinson, a Local 7600 representative.
A. In the LVN training, you get the basics—biology, anatomy, psychology—but you also learn about nursing care plans, sterile processing, wound care and get hands-on training all while attending school. I can assist RNs in several procedures, do minor surgical assists, order and co-sign documents in KP HealthConnect®.
A. My confidence has gone through the roof. I was selected to go to the KP Quality Conference, and I was invited to speak in a leadership meeting about my experience. The girls on the unit tease me now, saying they want my autograph.
The Colorado Couriers team is busy with 41 Kaiser Permanente facilities, more than 400 non-KP locations, and about 180,000 pickups and deliveries a year.
When it comes to outside contractors, the SEIU Local 105 contract requires that Human Resources provide the union with specific information about outsourcing, including who is doing the work, the affected job classification, the number of hours involved and what facilities were impacted.
That information wasn’t being provided, so Dominic Jones, a courier driver and Local 105 steward, objected.
“I saw that we were contracting out regular courier service, and it didn’t make any sense,” Jones says. “I knew that it was costing the company more money.”
As a result, the unit-based team took a close look at the department’s processes.
Team members collaborated with couriers in Northern California, who had done similar work, and discovered they could hire another employee, improve routes, reduce use of outside contractors—and still save money.
First steps were to work with internal customers to assess their needs, then reconfigure and bring routes in-house that had been contracted out.
They hired an additional employee to reduce overtime and outside courier costs on the weekends, and purchased new technology for central dispatching that enabled better tracking of pickups and deliveries.
Drivers got smartphones to receive information in real time, which made it possible to monitor drivers’ locations using GPS and find the closest driver for an unscheduled pickup.
In addition to new technology, the team worked with the region’s labs to ensure pickup times met the lab workflow.
“I am very supportive of the work our unit-based team has accomplished,” says Jones, who feels his concerns were addressed by the changes. “We are still outsourcing stat work that we can’t get to, but we are in the process of hiring on-call drivers, which will ease that burden.”
The team exceeded its stretch goal and saved an average of $25,577 a month, a cost reduction of 48.2 percent. By the end of 2013, the team’s effort had resulted in a cost savings of $145,165, and projected a savings of more than $375,000 for the following year.
“We had many painful conversations about how to make this work,” says manager Terry Wagner. “But the team’s input was invaluable. Each individual has been a contributor at some point.”
(3:26)
Medical Assistant Sandra Da Rocha shares how she overcame her fear of taking college-level courses—and of using a computer—and signed up for online courses available to union-represented employees through the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust.
