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.
What can your team do to use your physical space more efficiently?
What can your team do to reach out to patients proactively? What else could your team do to help patients manage chronic conditions?
What can your team do to explain the "why" behind what you are doing?
What can your team do to improve your communication with patients?
Use the posters and tools at right in presentations or meetings to help your teams overcome barriers, compare results and reach high performance.
The PowerPoint slides ("These Results Prove It's Working") show examples of unit-based teams from every region making a difference for KP members and patients.
Borrow from the ideas on this page to inspire your team, convince doubters to come on board, and identify projects and practices that have worked for others.
UBT fairs are a dynamic, engaging forum for spreading successful practices and sharing ideas. Throughout Kaiser Permanente, regions and facilities are discovering that UBT fairs help inspire teams to take on new performance improvement challenges.
The KP Value Compass commits us to delivering the best quality and service at the most affordable price, in the best place to work. And here’s the thing about service—everybody knows how to tell bad from good and good from great.
It’s not easy, in the crunch of a busy workday, to give every member and patient great service every time they call or visit. But these three simple tools can help. Each can be learned quickly and can be discussed, used and perfected by your team:
Amazon. Facebook. Uber. Count the ways that technology has changed the way people shop, share information, get around—and the way work is done in those industries. Now add health care to that list.
That was the message of the 2016 Work of the Future Conference in November, where 200 Kaiser Permanente managers and workers looked at how health care is changing, and how management and labor can collaboratively shape those changes at KP.
Industry and union leaders shared emerging workforce trends and practices. They also praised KP and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions’ approach to performance improvement, problem solving and workforce development.
“Kaiser and the union coalition have nailed it when it comes to workforce training, workforce planning and making sure we're preparing for the future,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. “The collaborative approach really shines when we talk about training, workforce development and finding ways to help workers ladder up in their careers.”
With the help of unit-based teams, health care innovation has brought patients better and faster treatment at KP, said Nirav Shah, MD, senior vice president of clinical operations for the Southern California region. For instance, KP hip replacement patients often walk off the operating table, go home without spending a night in the hospital and get nursing care and physical therapy at home. “Radical transparency, shared data and the wisdom of unit-based teams” are essential to making such changes work, he said.
KP and union workforce planners shared how workers can prepare for more changes coming to health care by mastering four critical skills:
These skills are among the new training programs, previewed at the conference, to be offered to coalition union-represented workers in 2017 (learn more). Digital fluency, for instance, covers mobile devices, applications and their impact on health care. Kaiser Permanente and the coalition unions, working in partnership, have given KP workers a head start in at least two of the other critical skills—collaboration and process improvement.
Conference participants also learned from the experience of other organizations. DTE Energy, a Detroit-based public utility, worked with its unions to avoid layoffs even during the Great Recession, said Diane Antishin, DTE Energy’s vice president of HR Operations.
Michael Langford, president of Utility Workers Union of America, described his union’s training and apprenticeship programs, which have helped his members nationally adapt to changes in their industry.
As with our work in the Labor Management Partnership, interest-based bargaining helped both parties achieve their goals.
“If you come in with positional arguments you’ll never get it done,” said Langford. “But if you can get to what the underlying problem is, you can solve it.”
At Kaiser Permanente, the patient is at the center of all decision making, and metrics can help us see at a glance the impact—positive or negative—that a team's decisions have had on a patient. The key to good metrics is finding the few, vital pieces of information that help us understand that impact.
“The purpose of measurement in quality improvement work is for learning, not judgment,” says Bob Lloyd, the executive director of performance improvement at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an independent nonprofit in Massachusetts.
Remember, the best efforts to improve and sustain performance happen in partnership. Use these tools to become proficient in performance improvement techniques, then achieve a higher quality of care and service to our members.
